Crime and Political Violence

This chapter explores the close connections between crime, violence, and politics, considering the significance of criminal organizations to contemporary security concerns. Scholarship on political violence often treats states and crime as distinct spheres, asserting artificially clear conceptual boundaries between criminal and political actors. Yet empirical realities demonstrate that such dichotomous characterizations obscure the strategic engagement of criminal organizations with political systems, the participation of state actors in shaping illicit economies, and the varied role of violence across these domains. Updating our understanding of the relationship between the criminal and the political is vital, given the high levels of criminal and related state violence in some parts of the world, particularly Latin America. This chapter emphasizes the importance of situating criminal actors within complex webs of relations, examining scholarship on three relational dimensions: state-crime relations, crime-society interactions, and intra-group criminal dynamics. The chapter concludes by tracing out an agenda for future research, calling for a broader geographic and conceptual scope in the study of criminal violence and reflecting on some of the potential changes provoked by the second Trump presidency in the United States.