Guest Talk Prof Trevor Stack

16 December 2019, 18.00, Room L-155
Institut für Ethnologie
Oettingenstrasse 67

Prof. Dr. Trevor Stack (University of Aberdeen):

Beyond Good and Evil – Rethinking Civil Society Responses to Organised Crime

I draw on the findings of the large team project that I am leading on societal responses to crime-related violence in Mexico. Our project focused on societal responses because Mexico’s institutional responses have not been effective, and to the extent that the term “organised crime” is useful at all, I argue that it is organised around the institutions themselves, which provide illegal protection to criminal business as well as to legal business. Though political scientists have made similar points by writing of “criminal governance”, my aim is to include “civil society responses” within the same analytical framework, helping to avoid the Manicheism of assuming a “good” civil society fighting against “bad” criminal organisations. By recognizing that civil society has often enabled criminal business, I pose the question of when and to what effect civil society might instead impede it, whether by mitigating the effects or reducing the institutional margins.

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