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A revelatory account of the ways covert, nefarious relationships between state officials and criminal groups shape daily life for all. 

Far too often, the line between legal and illegal action is crossed by actors and organizations on both sides of the law. From the old Chicago Machine getting rich off criminal activity to Mexican drug cartels placing politicians in office, these relationships between criminals and the government coordinate forms of power in ways that affect where people live, what opportunities they can pursue, how they spend money, and how they treat one another. In Dark Governance, sociologist Javier Auyero describes how this kind of governance works and what it means for civic life. 

Auyero analyzes instances of dark governance, including gangs in Ecuador and paramilitaries in Colombia who exert territorial control through violent specialists and government actors. He then turns to the less-studied case of the “colectivos” in Venezuela to show the scope of political work clandestine connections can achieve by thwarting grassroots organizations. In El Salvador and Honduras, the ties between gang members on the one hand, and politicians and elected officials on the other, serve to illustrate the impact dark governance has on urban spatial arrangements and on electoral campaigns. Dark Governance also offers an in-depth study of police-trafficker collusion in Argentina, which allows Auyero to identify the ways covert connections between state actors and drug traffickers operate in marginalized communities, affecting interpersonal violence. In addition to these examples in Latin America, Auyero also shares case studies in the United States and China. Dark governance can be seen in US organizations that patrol the borders and assert their control over migrants through their illicit connections with state authorities. In China, land expropriation and development projects are sometimes delayed when some households refuse to leave their properties. Enter the thugs-for-hire frequently contracted by local governments across the country to coerce residents into complying with government orders. 

Demonstrating the very real effects of dark governance, Auyero argues that though the organizations involved in these dark arrangements differ, their collaboration results in a singular effect: the ability to control populations. But when these relationships come out of the shadows, collective action can bring them down.

This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the mining industry. It follows a campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the shocking loss of some 10,000 lives.

Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, Kristian Lasslett examines how an articulation of capitalist growth mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly ‘responsible’ corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses.

State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.