Criminal War and Peace
Date and Time
Criminal violence claims more lives globally than interstate and civil wars combined, yet it remains concentrated in certain regions while others escape this scourge. This project seeks to explain both why criminal violence is high in some places and not others, and why it becomes particularly intractable in democracies. While authoritarian regimes can avoid criminal violence through brutal repression or state-criminal collusion, democracies often become trapped in cycles where policy shocks—from housing demolitions to kingpin arrests to immigration enforcement—disrupt power balances between criminal groups and spark turf violence that mobilizes voters to demand "iron-fist" security policies and parties to supply such policies. Drawing on fine-grained data, ethnographic research, and cross-national analysis across Chicago, Mexico, El Salvador, and Myanmar, the project examines how these democratic responses often perpetuate vicious cycles of violence and offers evidence-based policy alternatives for breaking these destructive patterns.
Speaker
Sarah Z. Daly, Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.
Moderated by Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Alisha Holland, Gates Professor of Developing Societies, Government Department, Harvard University. Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University.
About the Speaker
Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Organized Violence After Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022). She has published widely in the fields of international relations and comparative politics, with a particular focus on war and peace, democracy, organized crime, geopolitics, and Latin America.
About the Moderator
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is also a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation. His research focuses on democracy and authoritarianism, political parties, weak and informal institutions, and most recently, the crisis of democracy in the United States. He and Daniel Ziblatt are authors of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times best-seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. Levitsky has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently writing a book on the sources of global democratic resilience in the 21st Century.
Alisha Holland is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Government at Harvard University. Her research examines the comparative political economy of development, with a focus on urban politics, social policy, and Latin America. She is the author of Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press), which explores state enforcement practices around property law violations such as squatting, street vending, and electricity theft. Her current book project studies the politics of large infrastructure projects in Latin America. Holland’s broader interests include law, migration, crime control, subnational governance, and corruption. Before joining the Harvard faculty, she was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She holds an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.
Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government at Harvard University. She specializes in the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, political representation, political economy, and religion and politics. She is the author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 1996), and editor or co-editor of several volumes, including Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009) and The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (Cambridge University Press, 2005, with Scott Mainwaring). Her current research focuses on the development of social welfare regimes in Brazil and the political economy of inequality in Latin America. Hagopian has previously taught at the University of Notre Dame, Tufts University, and Harvard, and has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, MIT, and Nuffield College, Oxford.