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Lurking behind a well-known fact—rapid urbanization has left huge populations living in informal areas—lies a startling truth: tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. Who, what, and how criminal organizations govern all vary enormously. In the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, heavily armed drug syndicates provide everyday order, while police enter almost exclusively in lethal raids that send residents scrambling for cover (Arias and Barnes 2017). In São Paulo’s periphery, a hegemonic prison gang bans unauthorized homicides and resolves disputes via juries of imprisoned members, but maintains a light territorial presence; police enter at will but do not challenge the gang’s authority, and a peaceful, low-homicide “symbiosis” (Denyer Willis 2009) obtains. In Medellín, Colombia, hundreds of neighborhood gangs enforce property rights, tax local businesses, provide high-interest loans, and even produce and sell food staples; in nearby Cali, gangs take little interest in governing civilians (Arias 2017; Blattman et al. 2020). Even in the United States and the UK, criminal governance at the local level can be intense, if largely off the radar (Campana and Varese 2018; Jankowski 1991).
What unites these cases is that, for those governed, states’ claims of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force ring hollow; for many quotidian issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and call the police for problems beyond gangs’ purview—or even to inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior (e.g., Barnes 2018). States may actively contest criminal authority, but just as often they ignore, deny, or even collaborate with it. The results are distinctly non-Weberian: states and the criminal groups they are purportedly trying to eliminate form a “duopoly of violence” (Skaperdas and Syropoulos 1997, 61), one that can be competitive or collusive (Arias 2017; Barnes 2017), turbulent or stable.
This duopoly of violence distinguishes criminal governance from both state governance and common forms of non-state governance. In our workplaces, civic organizations, and even families we are subject to the rules, impositions, and decisions of those vested with authority. But in all these cases, as Weber (1946) pointed out, the state is the final enforcer and enabler of such authority. No such...