COLLOQUIUM TALK | March 16, 12:30-2:00PM | “The Politics of Criminal Governance and Deepening Democracy” with Eduardo Moncada

[Globalmetrostudies Departmental]

Events

Join us for a conversation with  Eduardo Moncada  at the Comparative Politics Colloquium   “The Politics of Criminal Governance and Deepening Democracy” March 16, 12:30-2:00PM Social Sciences Building 202 This event is co-sponsored by Global Metropolitan Studies and the Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley Is it possible to deepen democracy in territories where criminals govern? Top-down political efforts in Latin America to reform rule of law institutions often fail due to issues of state capacity, corruption and the politicization of security. Existing research finds that crime and violence linked to organized criminal actors negatively impacts the ability of citizens to participate in democratic politics. But attention to variation in the nature of criminal regimes shows that distinct forms of criminal rule can generate conditions that either limit or enable the ability of citizens to deepen democracy from below as they make demands on the state for public goods. Moncada illustrates these dynamics using comparative evidence from Mexico City. He traces how variation in criminal regimes at the neighborhood-level within a single city can produce distinct responses by citizens to similar basic needs unmet by the state. Eduardo Moncada is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on crime, violence, subnational politics, and the political economy of development.  He is the author of Cities, Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2016) and co-editor of the edited volume Inside Countries: Subnational Research in Comparative Politics (Cambridge University Press), and Resisting Extortion (Cambridge University Press).  He has also published articles in Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, Global Crime, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and the Latin American Research Review. His research has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Society of Criminology, the Ford Foundation and National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the Fulbright-Hays program, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Open Society Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He has held fellowships at New York University and Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. Moncada’s current research project is a book-length comparative study of the political economy of social resistance to illicit taxation by criminal protection rackets in Latin America. ABOUT GMS The Global Metropolitan Studies Program was established as a field of study at UC Berkeley to address major transformations in cities around the world, and to change how we study cities from a multidisciplinary perspective. Urbanization brings a range of new political configurations and challenges — ecological crises, processes of democratization and de-democratization, urban marginality, and emergent strategies of recognition and resistance. Global Metropolitan Studies is a community of scholars across disciplines at Berkeley that investigates these new challenges and politics of the new urban century.   Bringing together numerous faculty, this multidisciplinary endeavor supports research and houses graduate curricula. GMS sponsors a Designated Emphasis, a certificate program to support Ph.D. scholarship in the field. It is one of a handful of Designated Emphases selected by the UC Berkeley campus to mark a new generation of scholarship and to consolidate an emerging academic field. GMS also supports interdisciplinary research communities with research funding opportunities and by sponsoring student groups. GLOBAL METROPOLITAN STUDIES University of California, Berkeley Our mailing address is: globalmet...@berkeley.edu Website: https://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/