The Coronavirus pandemic is fueling conflict and fostering extremism while concurrently empowering gangs, cartels, and mafias in their quest for power and profit. In COVID-19, Gangs, and Conflict, Editors John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker bring together a curated collection of both new and previously published material to explore the trends and potentials of the global pandemic emergency. Topics include an exploration of proto-statemaking by criminal groups, the interaction of pandemics and conflict, as well as a comparison of gangs, criminal cartels, and mafias exploiting the crisis and exerting criminal governance in Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, and South Africa. Implications for national security, biosecurity, slums, transnational organized crime, and threats and opportunities in the contested pandemic space are assessed. SWJ

The Coronavirus pandemic is fueling conflict and fostering extremism while concurrently empowering gangs, cartels, and mafias in their quest for power and profit. In COVID-19, Gangs, and Conflict, Editors John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker bring together a curated collection of both new and previously published material to explore the trends and potentials of the global pandemic emergency. Topics include an exploration of proto-statemaking by criminal groups, the interaction of pandemics and conflict, as well as a comparison of gangs, criminal cartels, and mafias exploiting the crisis and exerting criminal governance in Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, and South Africa. Implications for national security, biosecurity, slums, transnational organized crime, and threats and opportunities in the contested pandemic space are assessed. SWJ

Covid-19 is reshaping and challenging governments, societies and economies in previously unimaginable ways—but gangsters and profiteers have adapted. They have found new routes for illegal commodities, from narcotics to people. Shortages, lockdowns and public attitudes have brought the underworld and upperworld closer together, as criminals strive to meet needs, maximise opportunities and fill governance vacuums. Unscrupulous fraudsters are touting fake remedies to desperate people: counterfeit drugs, and trafficked wildlife used in traditional medicine. Social distancing and restrictions have seen online transactions and cyber-ops replacing or supplementing physical shipments, opening opportunities for scammers and hackers. Heavy-handed state responses have created new illicit markets by prohibiting the sale of particular goods and services, while some elites have capitalised on the pandemic for personal or political gain. Covid has cast a long shadow over the rule of law. Criminal Contagion uncovers its extraordinary impacts on the global illicit economy, and their long-term implications.

"In the tradition of bestselling explainers like The Tipping Point, [this] book [is] based on cutting edge science that breaks down the idea of extreme conflict--the kind that paralyzes people and places--and then shows how to escape it"--

This ethnography of a gang war in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Oakwood, just blocks from the famed Venice Beach boardwalk, provides a rare eyewitness account of the urban violence pervasive in the recent history of the United States. With seventeen people killed and more than fifty injured, the hostilities over ten months in 1993 and 1994 marked the peak of gang violence in the history of Los Angeles, a city once labeled the "gang capital of the nation." The conflict began as a quarrel among individuals, some of whom had gang affiliations. Over time, the feud engulfed families and soon grew into a sustained clash between African American and Latino gangs. Eventually, victims fell who were not members of opposing gangs, but who fit certain racial and gender profiles. The conflict began to take on the attributes of what one local newspaper sensationalized as a "race war." Karen Umemoto lived nearby during this conflict and undertook two years of ethnographic research during and immediately following the spate of killings. She now offers a nuanced analysis of the trajectory and eventual end of this acute crisis. Her interviews with gang members, neighborhood residents, business leaders, police officers, and gang-intervention workers reveal the complexity of contemporary American urban conflict. The Truce highlights the differences in interpretations among combatants, witnesses, and law enforcement agents and others whose actions often had unintended consequences. Drawing on her experience living in multicultural Los Angeles and on the latest scholarship in a wide variety of disciplines, Umemoto provides much-needed guidance for policymakers and concerned members of the public faced with violence in an ever-changing urban landscape.

COVID-19, and responses to it, are exacerbating drivers of conflict by: diminishing trust in government leaders and institutions, increasing economic hardship and resource scarcity, disrupting — indeed often eroding — social cohesion. Armed groups, criminal networks, political entrepreneurs, and other disruptive actors have capitalized on the pandemic to expand their spheres of influence, which has the potential to generate future conflict and violence.

Winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. "I can’t imagine a more important book for our time." —Sebastian Junger The world is blowing up. Every day a new blaze seems to ignite: the bloody implosion of Iraq and Syria; the East-West standoff in Ukraine; abducted schoolgirls in Nigeria. Is there some thread tying these frightening international security crises together? In a riveting account that weaves history with fast-moving reportage and insider accounts from the Afghanistan war, Sarah Chayes identifies the unexpected link: corruption. Since the late 1990s, corruption has reached such an extent that some governments resemble glorified criminal gangs, bent solely on their own enrichment. These kleptocrats drive indignant populations to extremes—ranging from revolution to militant puritanical religion. Chayes plunges readers into some of the most venal environments on earth and examines what emerges: Afghans returning to the Taliban, Egyptians overthrowing the Mubarak government (but also redesigning Al-Qaeda), and Nigerians embracing both radical evangelical Christianity and the Islamist terror group Boko Haram. In many such places, rigid moral codes are put forth as an antidote to the collapse of public integrity. The pattern, moreover, pervades history. Through deep archival research, Chayes reveals that canonical political thinkers such as John Locke and Machiavelli, as well as the great medieval Islamic statesman Nizam al-Mulk, all named corruption as a threat to the realm. In a thrilling argument connecting the Protestant Reformation to the Arab Spring, Thieves of State presents a powerful new way to understand global extremism. And it makes a compelling case that we must confront corruption, for it is a cause—not a result—of global instability.