In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.

States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

What kind of war is Mexico's drug war? The prominent ''criminal insurgency'' approach helpfully focuses attention on cartel-state conflict, but unnecessarily redefines insurgency as ''state-weakening,'' eliding critical differences in rebels' and cartels' aims. Whereas rebels fight states, and cartels fight with one another, to conquer mutually prized territory and resources, cartels fight states ''merely'' to constrain their behavior and influence policy outcomes. This distinction yields a typology with theoretical consequences: decisive victory plays an important role in most models of civil war but is impossible or undesirable in wars of constraint. Theories of criminal war must therefore explain how ongoing coercive violence can be preferable to pacific strategies. I distinguish two such coercive logics of cartelstate conflict: violent lobbying and violent corruption. Lobbyings' more universalistic benefits elicit free riding, so turf war among cartels should make it rarer than violent corruption. This prediction accords with qualitative and quantitative evidence from Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil.

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43 NOVOS ESTUDOS 80 ❙❙ MARÇO 2008 RESUMOEntre os especialistas em segurança pública, tornou-se lugarcomum a idéia de que a guerra do tráfico no Rio de Janeiro é totalmente única no Brasil. Porém, essa afirmação é imprecisa. Organizações de narcotráfico em muitos aspectos comparáveis às facções cariocas existem em outros contextos urbanos. O que as diferencia é menos a capacidade de estabelecer o monopólio local sobre o comércio de drogas do que a resiliência da sua estrutura interna e, portanto, a duração da sua existência e dominação. Durante uma pesquisa de campo em nove comunidades de periferia de três cidades, observei não apenas uma alta variação nos graus de concentração entre os mercados locais de drogas, mas também de variação com o tempo dentro da mesma comunidade. Desta perspectiva, a estabilidade do mercado de drogas altamente concentrado do Rio de Janeiro pode ser visto como um equilí-brio único, no qual as forças de fragmentação operantes em outras cidades são neutralizadas por características especí-ficas das facções cariocas. O meu argumento é o de que tais características decorrem do domínio exercido pelas facções sobre o sistema penitenciário desde antes do início da sua expansão para o comércio de drogas. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: tráfico de drogas; guerra do tráfico; facções cariocas; sistema penitenciário do Rio de Janeiro.ABSTRACT It has become a commonplace that Rio de Janeiro' s guerra do tráfico is entirely unique within Brazil. In fact, this is inaccurate. Drug trafficking organizations that in many respects resemble Rio' s facções do exist in other urban contexts. What differentiates them is less the ability to establish a local monopoly on the drug trade than the resilience of their internal structure, and consequently the duration of their existence and domination. During field research in nine peripheral communities in three cities, I observed not only high variation in the degree of concentration between local drug markets, but also variation over time within single communities. In this light, the stability of Rio' s highly concentrated drug market can be seen as a unique equilibrium in which the fragmentary forces at work in other cities are neutralized by specific traits of Rio' s factions. These traits, I argue, stem from the dominion these factions have exerted over the state' s prison system since before the period of their original expansion into the drug trade.

State efforts to provide law and order can be counterproductive: mass-incarceration policies, while incapacitating and deterring individual criminals, can simultaneously strengthen collective criminal networks. Sophisticated prison gangs use promises of protection or punishment inside prison to influence and organize criminal activity on the street. Typical crime-reduction policies that make incarceration likelier and sentences harsher can increase prison gangs' power over street-level members and affiliates, a formal model shows. Leading cases from the Americas corroborate these predictions: periods of sharply rising incarceration, driven partly by anti-gang laws, preceded qualitative leaps in prison-gang power on the street. Critically, prison gangs use this capacity not only to govern and tax criminal markets but also to win leverage over state officials by orchestrating terror attacks, intentionally curtailing quotidian violence, or both. Thus, even if increased incarceration leads to reduced crime, it may do so by strengthening prison-gang power at the expense of state authority.

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Gangs govern millions worldwide. Why rule? and how do they respond to states? Many argue that criminal rule provides protection when states do not, and that increasing state services could crowd gangs out. We began by interviewing leaders from 30 criminal groups in Medellín. The conventional view overlooks gangs’ indirect incentives to rule: governing keeps police out and fosters civilian loyalty, protecting other business lines. We present a model of duopolistic competition with returns to loyalty and show under what conditions exogenous changes to state protection causes gangs to change governance levels. We run the first gang-level field experiment, intensifying city governance in select neighborhoods for two years. We see no decrease in gang rule. We also examine a quasi-experiment. New borders in Medellín created discontinuities in access to government services for 30 years. Gangs responded to greater state rule by governing more. We propose alternatives for countering criminal governance.