Producing and Activating Collective Efficacy: Violence, Drug Dealing, and Meaning-Making in Medellín, Colombia

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Modes and Explanations of Violence

Abstract

Sociological and criminological theories of collective efficacy in urban communities assume that residents who are known law-breakers impede violence and crime control. Yet most analyses of collective efficacy emphasize statistical outcomes that overlook the ways in which offenders facilitate social cohesion and shared expectations for social control. Based on 45 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a poor zone of Medellín, Colombia, I examine how a group of armed men formed a partnership with a nonprofit and retreated from the drug trade. I found that the armed men’s use of extrajudicial violence held coinciding meanings and was experienced locally as a form of problem-solving and solidarity, which nonprofit staff and residents leveraged to reorient the men toward new patterns of behavior. This indicates that economic interests and policing cannot fully explain the armed group’s transformation. My findings suggest that the ongoing construction of shared definitions of acceptable behavior produced and activated a sense of collective efficacy for violence and crime reduction in the zone. This study demonstrates how perpetrators of violence influence collective problem-solving over time and sheds new light on the interactional dimensions of collective efficacy that work to reduce violence and crime in poor urban communities.

Author

• Jon Gordon, New York University