State Responses to Vigilante Groups: A Comparative Urban Analysis

• In Event: New Frontiers in the Study of Crime and Violence

Abstract

Why do states respond to groups of citizens who take the law into their own hands in sharply contrasting ways? In this research project I analyze variation in state responses to collective vigilantism. We conventionally view the state as either having or aspiring to a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a territory. But across the world citizens have historically and continue today to organize extralegal violence precisely in localities where the state is present. Existing research struggles to explain why states respond in different ways to vigilante groups across space and time. Explaining this variation can provide insights into broader related dynamics, including the nature of state-society relations, governance, and order. This paper uses a two-stage research design that leverages variation in urban government responses to similar forms of vigilantism within and across cities experiencing high levels of crime in the Global North and Global South. In the first stage of the project I leverage within-city variation in government responses to vigilantism in New York City (NYC) during the 1960s and 1970s. During this period of intense crime in the city’s history, the police lacked the capacity to enforce the rule of law and groups of citizens collectively used and threatened extra-legal violence to establish order. Yet, the city government responded to vigilante groups in contrasting ways across localities within NYC and also over time toward each vigilante group. Comparing state responses within a single city enables me to hold constant a range of background factors and thus test a series of explanatory hypotheses derived from existing research on armed politics, the political economy of development, and the politics of crime. The second stage of the paper broadens the project’s comparative component to assess how far the findings from the first stage travel to other empirical settings. Here I harness variation in contemporary local government responses to vigilante groups in two other global cities: Mexico City, Mexico and Cape Town, South Africa. In both cities crime is a key public concern, police have limited capacity, and citizens have organized vigilante groups. Yet, as in NYC, both cities’ governments have responded to these vigilante groups in ways that vary across territory within each and over time toward individual groups. My analysis draws on data collected during field research, archival materials, and interviews. The research design thus offers a unique comparative analysis across both space and time of a core aspect of politics and governance within and across major global cities.

Author

• Eduardo Moncada, Barnard College, Columbia University