The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power

Abstract

The conventional approach to criminal victimization views it as a traumatic but one-time act. This overlooks a layer of contentious and dynamic politics between victims and criminal actors that we have yet to analyze. I develop a new theoretical framework to analyze the strategic behaviors that victims and criminal actors use to pursue and resist power as part of the political process of criminal victimization. The framework enables us to better observe, conceptualize, and theorize how victims exercise agency vis-à-vis their criminal perpetrators, as well as behaviors and practices that criminal actors undertake to carry out and sustain victimization, but which are overlooked by the traditional focus on their use and threat of coercive force. I illustrate the framework’s analytic utility with an empirical analysis of the victimization of informal street vendors in a major Latin American city under a criminal protection racket. The argument and empirical findings suggest ways to expand and deepen the research agenda on the politics of criminal victimization.

The Politics of Vigilantism

“…Vigilantism has long been overlooked by political scientists, to the discipline’s detriment. Over time, political scientists have realized the relevance of many other phenomena that were once dismissed as apolitical, such as riots (Brass, 1997; Wilkinson, 2006), communal violence (Krause, 2019; Tajima, 2014), extralethal violence (Fujii, 2013), crime victimization (Bateson, 2012; Moncada, 2019b), and sexual violence (Cohen, 2013; Wood, 2006b). Vigilantism likewise deserves a central place in the political science literature.…”

“…https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6966-5770 Notes 1. Moncada (2019b) categorizes this type of power as a form of social domination.…”

Legacies of Resistance: Mobilization Against Organized Crime in Mexico

“…Where predatory actors severely disrupt daily activities, target community members with high levels of violence, and apply rules arbitrarily, we expect local communities to have incentives to rise up. While armed groups often use extortion and protection rackets to harness economic benefits (Moncada, 2018), particularly exploitative armed groups can trigger resentment among ordinary citizens and local elites, especially if local conditions worsen dramatically and rapidly. Where armed groups are extremely violent and rapacious, such that even compliance with imposed rules is not rewarded, we should expect communities to be more willing to rise up.…”

More than money: The political consequences of reparations

“…Studies find that Mexican victims of criminal violence are most likely to be politically active when they are embedded in strong social networks (Dorff 2017) and that in Colombia, those victimized by state groups are less likely to participate than victims whose perpetrator was not linked to the government (Voytas and Crisman 2021). And Moncada (2018) notes that in considering downstream responses, ongoing interactions between victims and criminals warrant attention. The theme emerging from this line of inquiry is that there are dynamic and nonuniform patterns in political participation among victims of violence.…”