Global Ganglands: Towards a New Political Economy of Violence and Order in Most of the World

Dennis Rodgers, Professor of Urban Social and Political Research, University of Glasgow

3.30pm, Seminar Room 248, Medical School Building
Refreshments will be available following the seminar
Please confirm your attendance to jeane.bonner@glasgow.ac.uk by Monday 6th May

In his pioneering study of gangs in 1920s Chicago, Frederick Thrasher (1927: 3) famously claimed that they represented “life, often rough and untamed”. His remark has generally been taken to mean that gangs fundamentally reflect wider structural circumstances, and certainly, there exists a long-standing tradition of research spanning anthropology, criminology, history, political science, and sociology that insightfully explores how gangs are related to situations of exclusion or discrimination, for example. Gangs can however also be seen more conceptually, as a paradigmatic lens through which to understand broader social processes. Focusing initially on gang dynamics in a poor neighbourhood of Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, this presentation moves from the local to the national to the geopolitical, using gangs as a trope through which to get to grips with a newly emergent political economy of violence and order in most of the world today, one that can be said to effectively represent a process of global “gangsterisation”.

Please confirm your attendance to jeane.bonner@glasgow.ac.uk by Monday 6th May.

First published: 11 March 2013

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