By Martin Ewi, Liesl Louw-Vaudran, Willem Els, Richard Chelin, Yussuf Adam and Elisa Samuel Boerekamp

Collaborative research between the Institute for Security Studies and the Judicial Training Institute of Mozambique revealed that people in Cabo Delgado see the discovery and poor governance of natural resources as a cause of the insurgency. The study also found few links between the insurgency and organised crime, and that regional rather than ethnic differences play a major role in the conflict.

 Key findings: The discovery and poor governance of natural resources such as rubies and liquefied natural gas have escalated terrorism. Regional inequities, not ethnicity, are a major grievance in Cabo Delgado. Despite resentment of the elite, who are blamed for the region’s poverty, there is no evidence that people are voluntarily joining the insurgency en masse. The criminal justice sector lacks basic resources and skills to prosecute the growing number of terrorist suspects. People in Cabo Delgado are more concerned about the threat of the Mashababos (Alu-Sunnah wal Jama'ah) than the Islamic State. Recommendations Government of Mozambique: Partner with local organisations to address legitimate grievances Develop a national strategy covering all aspects of the crisis Effectively manage the amnesty programme Establish a centralised national inter-agency counter-terrorism unit, and prioritise coordination and intelligence-led military operations Strengthen the criminal justice system to prosecute terrorism, organised crime and corruption Set up a commission of inquiry into the drivers of violent extremism Strengthen intelligence sharing with neighbouring countries SADC and Mozambique’s neighbours: Assist Mozambique to tighten border security Regularly share intelligence Mosques, Islamic centres and local markets are believed to be meeting points and areas of recruitment and radicalisation. Respondents fear that the violence could easily spread to other parts of Mozambique and countries in Southern Africa. Evidence of a nexus between terrorism and organised crime is weak.  Since the deployment of foreign forces, mass recruitment has stopped as Al Sunnah evolves into a professional, well-trained group, practising guerrilla warfare.

Pretoria, South Africa, Institute for Security Studies, 2022. 52p.

By The International Crisis Group

The number of women active in Mexico’s criminal organisation has risen steadily in recent years. Women often view joining criminal groups as a way of protecting themselves from gender-based violence and acquiring the power and respect they lack in law-abiding society. Searing personal accounts, media reports and data analysis of the prison census all point to the conclusion that Mexican women are joining criminal outfits in greater numbers. Frequently from poor backgrounds and broken families, young women offenders report that they drifted into criminality through their partners or connections they forged at drug use hotspots. Male crime bosses tend to value women for their perceived competence, respect for hierarchy and ability to evade police attention. Women’s presence in illegal groups has strengthened these organisations. It has also more deeply embedded crime in the fabric of Mexican society and within families. Deterring women and children from lives of crime will require the state and non-governmental organisations to provide alternative pathways to earning a living through initiatives in, for example, jails, drug rehabilitation centres and schools. The ascent of women in Mexican crime groups represents a striking departure from how they have traditionally intersected with these organisations. Women and their bodies have long been targets of Mexican criminal outfits. When these organisations battle for turf, they often commit femicides and “disappearances” of women – namely, killing them and disposing of the remains – in part to demonstrate dominance in a geographical region. Witness how crimes against women have increased in areas where illegal organisations jockey for control: killing sprees erupted in the border city of Ciudad Juárez in the 1990s and more recently in Zacatecas, Puebla, Veracruz, the State of Mexico and other places where criminal groups are vying for power. But increasing numbers of women are attracted to the benefits they can reap from joining a criminal organisation. Gender-based violence is rife in Mexico, and judicial redress is virtually non-existent. Young women interviewed for this report almost uniformly experienced abuse in their homes and communities. Most noted that the support of criminal groups and the status they acquire within them can offer protection, recognition and even dignity – in addition, of course, to income.

Brussels: International Crisis Groups, 2023. 39p.

By Ata Hoodashtian

This study about Corruption Corruption is is not not based on on a a specific specific juridical juridical or or economic economic approach. Corruption can also be be considered as as a a moral moral and and philosophical philosophical issue. The emphasise here is is given to to a a political and philosophical approach with a focus on the last and the most important a on evolutions of Western Societies: the decline of the State and the decline of values. of the State and the decline of values.

Writers and scholars, whom I used as references for this paper, have been studying each of these I as of evolutions for for the the last 20 20 years in in the the West. Globalization is is an an important fact related to to these problems. But how and why? Sociologists and philosophers have been focusing on these issues to study the social and political crisis. To understand what corruption is, is, we we will need to understand to the the function and nature of of the the structural crisis of of Western societies at at the the level of Institutions and of and values. But, how would corruption be related to these facts? These are the questions developed in this paper.

By Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom

We're in an era of ever increasing attention to animal rights, and activism around the issue is growing more widespread and prominent. In this volume, Jonas Lindblom and Kerstin Jacobsson use the animal rights movement in Sweden to offer the first analysis of social movements through the lens of Emile Durkheim's sociology of morality. By positing social movements as essentially a moral phenomenon-and morality itself as a social fact-the book complements more structural, cultural, or strategic action-based approaches, even as it also demonstrates the continuing value of classical sociological approaches to understanding contemporary society.

Netherlands, Amsterdam University Press. 2016, 145pg

By Michael Tonry

Whites have been afraid of Black people since “20 or so” were “purchased” in Jamestown, the first permanent British colony, in 1619. Southern Whites’ fears of racial insurrections and wars pervaded American politics through the Civil War. For nearly a century afterward, southern and many other Whites feared economic and social competition from Black people and believed they were inferior human beings. Since the 1960s, most Whites have ceased believing in inherent Black inferiority but have continued to oppose integration of schools and housing and exaggeratedly feared Black criminals. Two widespread earlier practices, vigilantism and lynching, although in retrospect reviled, have modern equivalents that target Black people. Police use of the “third degree,” curbside punishment, and brutal prisons were for long acceptable to fearful and angry White citizens, just as racial profiling, police violence, and extreme punishment disparities are in our time. Call that “delegated vigilantism.” White citizens no longer themselves capture and kill alleged wrongdoers but, not so different, majorities have for a half century supported policies that authorize or mandate routine use of unprecedentedly severe punishments that ruin lives. Call that “less-than-lethal lynching.”

United States, Crime and Justice Volume 52. 2023

By Danielle M. Olson, Tyler Musgrave, Divya Gumudavelly, Chardee Galan, Sarita Schoenebeck, D. Fox Harrell, and Riana E. Anderson

Police brutality—including the incidents that mobilized collective outrage and action across the world during the summer of 2020—has negatively impacted the psychological health of Black youth for generations. Police harassment is a persistent form of racial discrimination that Black youth frequently navigate (Brunson, 2007), and particularly as a consequence of vicarious trauma via social media, it has been associated with depressive and anxious sequelae (e.g., Tynes et al., 2019). While Black youth are faced with policing experiences in vivo and in vitro, many studies of the psychological impact of policing are contained within traditional retrospective surveys, which limits our understanding of youth’s in-the-moment perceptions and desired concurrent actions. To expand the efforts to assess and redress youth’s experiences with police encounters, this manuscript details the development of an afterschool program that supports adolescents in the creation of a series of video game and virtual reality (VR) narratives. A participatory design method was utilized to co-create the perception of policing experiences with Detroit high school students enrolled in a computer science course, allowing them to actualize their experiences “on screen” and work towards redressing these experiences through co-construction and virtual activism.

United States, Journal of Youth Development Vol 18 Issue 3. 2023, 18pg

By Elizabeth Hinton and DeAnza Cook

This review synthesizes the historical literature on the criminalization and incarceration of black Americans for an interdisciplinary audience. Drawing on key insights from new histories in the field of American carceral studies, we trace the multifaceted ways in which policymakers and officials at all levels of government have used criminal law, policing, and imprisonment as proxies for exerting social control in predominantly black communities from the colonial era to the present. By underscoring this antiblack punitive tradition in America as central to the development of crime-control strategies and mass incarceration, our review lends vital historical context to ongoing discussions, research, and experimentation within criminology and other fields concerned about the long-standing implications of institutional racism, violence, and inequity entrenched in the administration of criminal justice in the United States from the top down and the ground up.

United States, Annual Review. 2020, 29pg

By Jeffrey S. Adler

This article explores a horrific 1945 child murder in New Orleans and argues that the case revealed broader developments in Southern criminal justice in the age of Jim Crow. Ernestine Bonneval tied her young children to an ironing board and lashed them, killing her 7-year-old daughter. The murder generated outrage, with residents demanding severe punishment, even the gallows, for the brutal crime. After a jury returned a guilty verdict, the judge sentenced the killer to one year in the state penitentiary. New Orleanians initially expressed fury at the lenient punishment but quickly conveyed sympathy for the murdering mother and perceived her as the victim of a failed legal system. The shift reflected four wider changes in white sensibilities about the role of the state. First, New Deal programs establishing a safety net during the Great Depression transformed white attitudes toward government authority. Second, Clementine Bonneval’s death became tethered to a national panic over juvenile delinquency, even though the victim was only 7. Third, gender ideals influenced perceptions of women who engaged in criminal violence. Fourth, and most important, Southern whites increasingly encoded violence as an African American behavior. As a consequence, white killers became hapless victims of circumstances beyond their control. The Bonneval murder was reinterpreted within a racialized construction of crime and criminal culpability that produced more aggressive policing and more draconian punishment for African American suspects and fewer arrests, indictments, convictions, and long prison sentences for white killers. Jim Crow, in short, shaped the modernization of Southern criminal justice.

USA, American Journal of Legal History. 2023, 17pg

By Mark Lauchs

     Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs are receiving increased attention by academics around the world. However, the field is in need of global data on how, when, where and why clubs form before any generalised conclusions can be drawn. This paper begins this process by attempting to identify every club that has formed in the world by location and date. 18 months of searching online through websites and social media identified 5072 separate clubs, which were then grouped by region and date. This data shows different trends of club formation in different regions. The data shows Western Nations formed clubs much earlier than other regions, but that Scandinavia, South America and East Asia are continuing to form new clubs at an increasing rate. Despite the USA being the country of origin of the culture, it only has 18% of all clubs. This paper concludes with suggestions for future research questions illuminated by the data, that try to explain the popularity of the culture and the environmental circumstances that lead to club formation.

Brisbane, Australia. Queensland University of Technology, 2020. 29pg

By: Christian Klement

The number of outlaw bikers is growing globally. Despite this, little research exists on these groups and their alleged violent tendencies. To address this, the current paper uses unique data to examine whether gang violence causes outlaw biker violence. The period examined runs from mid-2008 until early 2012 during which violent clashes occurred between outlaw bikers and street gang members involved in an alleged conflict in Copenhagen, Denmark. A precise description of each individual act of violence would make it possible to identify whether specific acts were carried out in furtherance of the alleged conflict. This would allow one to determine whether outlaw bikers commit violence on behalf of their club. However, such knowledge is unavailable. The paper therefore takes a different approach by examining whether acts of violence committed by the two groups are statistically associated. In other words, it considers whether one or more acts can be described as retaliatory during the observation periods. The sample consists of 640 individuals involved with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club or with non-biker street gangs–both of which are present in Copenhagen. Statistical models are used to predict 143 violent events committed by 196 outlaw bikers. The results suggest that violence committed by gang members predicts violence committed by outlaw bikers. This indicates that violent acts committed by outlaw bikers are at least partly a form of retaliation carried out on behalf of their club. The paper expands the literature on the kinds of inter-group, micro-level processes that can lead to reciprocal violence by including outlaw bikers in a literature that has previously focused on non-biker street gangs.

Aalborg, Denmark. Department of Sociology and Social Work, May 8th, 2019. 27pg

By Paul Larsson

This article deals with the policing of biker groups in Norway. It describes the two idealtypical approaches of dialogue and confrontation. It tries to explain why the police use certain methods. It finds that policing is rarely based on knowledge of what works or the causes of a problem. Instead the approaches chosen seem to reflect certain styles of policing described in cultural studies of the police.

Norway, CrossMark. June 11, 2018. 17pg

By  Anthony Morgan, Christopher Dowling and Isabella Voce 

Using national data on the criminal histories of 5,669 known outlaw motorcycle gang (OMCG) members from 39 gangs, this paper explores the prevalence of violent and organised crime offending among Australian OMCGs. Violent and profit-motivated offending was common among OMCG members. One in four had been apprehended for a recent offence involving violence and intimidation, and one in eight for organised crime-type offences. Offending and associated harm was concentrated among a relatively small group of members. Half of all chapters and three-quarters of gangs had members recently involved in organised crime-type offending. In 11 gangs, both office bearers and other members were involved in organised crime, indicative of their status as criminal organisations. These gangs were also among those with the highest prevalence of violence and intimidation offences. 

Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice, #586. February 2020. 18pg

By Christopher Dowling, Dominic Boland, Anthony Morgan, Julianne Webster, Yi-Ning Chiu and Roger Lowe 

This study explores changes to the internal culture of a sample of Australian outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs). We analysed data from 39 in-depth interviews with former OMCG members in Queensland to discern changes in recruitment practices, hierarchies and governance processes, as well as values, norms and relationships experienced and observed while members of an OMCG. Structurally, clubs changed little, although participants described how members were increasingly using the structures and systems of clubs for their own benefit. Changes were noted in recruitment practices, which were seen as increasingly geared towards enlisting violent, criminally-inclined men. There was also a perceived erosion of loyalty and camaraderie within OMCGs, with a shift towards younger, newer members who were seen as self-interested and financially motivated. These changes were contributing factors in decisions of many former members to disengage from OMCGs. 

Australia, Australia Institute of Criminology. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 615. February 2021. 16pg

By Timothy Cubitt, Christopher Dowling and Anthony Morgan 

This study examines the trends in and spatial distribution of recorded offending by Australian outlaw motorcycle gang (OMCG) affiliates at the onset of a territorial conflict between two clubs in the state of New South Wales. Results show an increase in recorded offending by OMCG affiliates involved in the conflict and based in the disputed territory. Comparable increases in recorded offending by these clubs were not detected in the areas surrounding this territory or in the rest of New South Wales, and there was little mobility into the conflict region by those outside of it. There was a smaller, short-lived increase in recorded crime by affiliates of other gangs in the conflict region but not elsewhere. In short, changes in offending patterns were largely limited to the clubs involved in the conflict and localised to the territory in dispute. This research can help guide focused law enforcement responses during periods of gang conflict. 

Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 667. 2021. 18pg

By Timothy Cubitt and Anthony Morgan 

Risk assessment tools are used widely in the criminal justice response to serious offenders. Despite growing recognition that certain outlaw motorcycle gang (OMCG) members and their clubs are likely to be involved in crime, particularly serious crime, this is not an area where risk assessment tools have been developed and validated. The nature of offending by OMCGs, and policing responses to OMCGs, requires a novel approach to risk assessment. This study uses machine learning methods to develop a risk assessment tool to predict recorded high-harm offending. Results are compared with those of a model predicting any recorded offending. The model predicted high-harm offending with a high degree of accuracy. Importantly, the tool appeared able to accurately identify offenders prior to the point of escalation. This has important implications for informing law enforcement responses. 

Australia, Australian Institute of Criminology. Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 646. March 2022. 18pg

By Julie Freccero, Audrey Taylor, Sarah Chynoweth, Justine DeSilva

Children and youth experiencing commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) often have some form of engagement with the child welfare system. Safe and stable housing is vital to minimize vulnerability to CSE, help survivors recover, and reduce revictimization. Yet housing and shelter are among the top service gaps reported by agencies serving trafficking survivors in San Francisco, a high density area for CSE. To address this disparity, in 2019, a coalition of agencies developed Family And Me (FAM), a new model of foster care designed to meet the needs of youth who have experienced or are at risk of CSE in the San Francisco Bay Area. The goal was to establish an evidence-based, youth-centered model of care that could be scaled throughout the State of California and beyond. The 3.5-year FAM pilot aimed to improve the health, safety, and well-being of youth affected by CSE and to increase the knowledge, capacity, and retention rates of the caregivers who support them by offering a range of enhanced support services for both youth and their caregivers. However, due to numerous challenges, such as COVID-19 restrictions and recruitment barriers, the FAM collaborative was only able to implement a portion of the original FAM model.

Berkeley, CA: Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law, 2022. 40p.

By Fernando Forattini

This brief article intends to demonstrate some of the problems with the main theories on corruption and introduce the reader to the new field of Anthropology of Corruption, a type of research that tries to understand one of the most pressing issues nowadays through a nonbinary point of view, but trying to understand the root of corruption, and its multifaceted characteristic, especially through its cultural aspect; and why it is, contemporarily, the most effective political-economic discourse – most at the times used in a populistic fashion, at the expense of democratic institutions. Therefore, we will briefly analyze the three main theoretical strands on corruption and point at some of its faults; then indicate to the reader what are the main goals Anthropology of Corruption, and what questions it seeks to answer; and, finally, the political impact that corruption discourses have on society, and its perils when instrumentalized in populistic discourses.

By Lucas Bartolomé -Chairperson, Mihnea Dorneanu -Chairperson

At the present time, the demand for drugs is growing as strong as ever, and to meet this demand, criminal organizations set up drug production operations, particularly in politically unstable regions, often with the collaboration of local militias. These operations help fund the violence and many other criminal activities committed by these organizations, including money laundering, wildlife trading, smuggling, prostitution, human trafficking, and modern-day slavery. Furthermore, the kind of drugs grown are harmful both to the growers of the raw material in the origin country, as they are often trapped in cycles of poverty which inhibit economic development, as well as to the users, due to the societal harm addiction causes upon the population. Therefore, it is essential to fight against the drug trade and find ways to mitigate its effect; however, this is notoriously difficult. Typically, the mechanism for these kinds of operations is the following: farmers in politically unstable regions are forced to grow the plants from which drugs are extracted as they are the only ones from which they are able to make a living; they do this under the protection of local warlords or militias, to whom they often have to pay tax to. Raw opium is delivered, generally through local middlemen, to the criminal organizations that handle the refining and distribution to the rest of the world. This is usually done with either the tacit acceptance of the government, which might consider the militias as strategically useful, or by bribing corrupt government officials who will turn a blind eye. Nowadays in Asia, there exist two main areas where drug production is rampant. These are the socalled "Golden Crescent" and "Golden Triangle". The Golden Crescent covers parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, though production is nowadays mostly concentrated in Afghanistan. The area has had a long history of cultivating poppies in order to extract opium at a small scale; nonetheless, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, many mujahideen guerrillas turned to poppy farming and opium refining as a source of income, and this continued and increased throughout the end of the Soviet occupation, and the beginning of Taliban rule, as Afghanistan became the world's major source of opioids and replaced Iran and Pakistan's dominance in the region. This lasted right up until the Taliban introduced a ban on poppy farming in 2001, which was brutally enforced and caused a sharp drop in poppy farming with an accompanying skyrocketing of the price. This was short-lived as the September 11th attacks soon occurred and the ensuing invasion of the country by the United States yet again plunged the area into conflict and poppy production once more became the only source of income for many farmers. Despite many attempts by the democratic Afghan government, to this day Afghanistan continues to be the world's largest producer of opioids, which mostly get trafficked to Europe and North America, and the end of the Afghan War and resumption of Taliban rule don't seem to have put a stop to it. Despite nominally being against the drug trade, the Taliban has been accused of using poppy farming to secure its own funding and of intentionally causing the spike in price in 2001 to sell its own reserves at a higher price. The democratic government seemed more inclined to genuinely try to solve the problem; however, local corrupt officials severely undermined its efforts. Though the Golden Crescent's main export is opium, recent forays into the production of synthetic drugs such as methamphetamines have been reported, and the region is also the top exporter of cannabis.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Model United Nations of Bucharest, 2023. 30p.

By Adam Baird , Matthew Louis Bishop , Dylan Kerrigan

The Southern Caribbean became a key hemispheric drug transhipment point in the late 1990s, to which the alarmingly high level of homicidal violence in Trinidad is often attributed. Existing research, concentrated in criminology and mainstream international relations, as well as the anti-drug policy establishment, tends to accept this correlation, framing the challenge as a typical post-Westphalian security threat. However, conventional accounts struggle to explain why murders have continued to rise even as the relative salience of narcotrafficking has actually declined. By consciously disentangling the main variables, we advance a more nuanced empirical account of how ‘the local’ is both inserted into and mediates the impact of ‘the global’. Relatively little violence can be ascribed to the drug trade directly: cocaine frequently transits through Trinidad peacefully, whereas firearms stubbornly remain within a distinctive geostrategic context we term a ‘weapons sink’. The ensuing murders are driven by the ways in which these ‘residues’ of the trade reconstitute the domestic gangscape. As guns filter inexorably into the community, they reshape the norms and practices underpinning acceptable and anticipated gang behaviour, generating specifically ‘residual’ forms of violence that are not new in genesis, but rather draw on long historical antecedents to exacerbate the homicide panorama. Our analysis emphasises the importance of taking firearms more seriously in understanding the diversity of historically constituted violences in places that appear to resemble—but differ to—the predominant Latin American cases from which the conventional wisdom about supposed ‘drug violence’ is generally distilled.

Political Geography. Volume 106, October 2023, 102966

By Shannan Mattiace1and Sandra Ley

ucatán state’s homicide level has remained low and steady for decades and criminalviolence activity is low, even while crime rates in much of the rest of the country have increased since 2006. In this research note, we examine five main theoretical expla-nations for Yucatán’s relative containment of violence: criminal competition, protection networks and party alternation, vertical partisan fragmentation, interagency coordin-ation, and social cohesion among the Indigenous population. Wefind that in Yucatán,interagency coordination is a key explanatory variable, along with cooperation aroundsecurity between Partido Revolucionario Institucional and Partido Acción Nacionalgovernments and among federal and state authorities

journal of Politics in Latin America2022, Vol. 14(1) 103–119© The Author(s) 2022Article reuse guidelines:sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/1866802X221079636journals.sagepub.com/home/pla