How Criminal Organization Presence Makes and Breaks Citizens

• In Event: Violent Actors and Threats to Local Democracy

Abstract

In areas where criminal organizations operate, local populations must adapt to new conditions in their political, economic, and social lives. In the face of organized criminal groups, citizens play an active role: self-defense groups, protests, security roundtables, and street masses are only some of the local reactions we observe. My project asks: What is the effect of criminal organization presence on citizen-state interactions? And why, when faced with the same phenomenon of criminal organization presence, do groups of citizens in some places pursue solutions through the state while in other places they pursue private solutions, going around the state?

I present evidence from an original survey of civil society actors to examine the effects of criminal organization presence on citizen-state interactions across Mexico. This subnational analysis demonstrates the importance of three factors: the strength of pre-existing civil society, degree of criminal competition, and level of state autonomy. I combine these survey results with municipal case studies to explain citizens’ decision of whether and how to contest criminal group presence; this decision has important downstream effects. My project complicates existing literature to suggest that in addition to weakening democracy in important ways, criminal group presence can also indirectly strengthen democracy, pushing citizens in some places to contest through the state.

Author

• Kaitlyn Chriswell, Harvard University