Announcements

Call for Papers: Special Section: ILLICITIES – City-Making and Organized Crime

This special section explores the ways in which heterogeneous governance actors, including formal state, private enterprises and organized criminal groups, co-produce cities. 

As spaces that concentrate economic wealth and political power cities are prone to struggles over the distribution of resources and often become arenas in which negotiations between the formal state and illicit actors - such as militia, mafia, drug trafficking and paramilitary groups – materialize and shape bodies, architectures and the built environment in general. Alongside this, security enforcers are also constantly diversifying their economic bases beyond classical protection rackets, building and shaping illicit value and production chains. As organized crime “weaponizes” formal urban development, and private and public enterprises depend on governing illicit territories and economies, citizens’ ability to own, manage, and access resources such as land, construction materials, apartments and urban utilities (water, electric energy and gas) is severely limited. This urges us to include the particular materialities of urban protection rackets in the analysis of illicit urbanization.

We invite contributions from around the world and a broad range of academic disciplines, including but not limited to anthropology, geography, sociology, criminology, political science, and international relations.

In addition to full length research papers, we also invite policy analyses from activists, NGO leaders, or practitioners. In their contributions, authors are invited to respond to (some of) the following questions:

1. How are different materialities and objects, such as urban utilities, housing, bodies/senses, technologies, and weapons tied to criminal and/or state activity and to the negotiations, conflicts or collaborations between state authorities and illicit groups?
2. What kind of built (infra)structures favor illicit activities and economies?
3. What patterns of urban forms, of buildings/architectures, and of infrastructures emerge out of il/licit city-making?
4. Do licit-illicit orders engender more or less equal distribution of goods and commons, as well as access to housing, infrastructures, and (public) spaces?
5. What kind of responses to illicit city-making can we observe from urban populations?

For more information see the full Call for Papers here.

Planned date of publication: April 2022.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 20 May 2021.

Please submit your abstract and bio to both editors: f.i.mueller@uva.nl; j.h.j.weegels@uva.nl.

Posted on 15 Apr 2021

Announcements

Call for Papers: Special Issue: From the Local to the Transnational: Linkages in the North and Central American Drug Trades

This journal special issue will advance the conversation on illicit drug markets in the Americas by fostering cross-fertilization among different methodologies and perspectives that have been previously analyzed as self-contained phenomena. It will provide an opportunity to observe the full cycle of illicit drugs production, trafficking, and consumption throughout North America, Central America and the Caribbean. Furthermore, it will promote a more comprehensive understanding of the social dynamics of development, violence, and drug policies; the way that these issues are addressed by the twenty-three national governments of the region, and the many more regional or local institutions that exist within each; and the mutual dependencies that exist between all of the region's multiple drug trades.

For suggested themes and more information see the full Call for Papers: English and Spanish

Deadline for submission: 

Deadline for submission of Letters of Intent (LOIs) is on December 4, 2020. LOIs submitted after this deadline will not be considered. LOIs should be sent to invited editors Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, Nathaniel Morris and John Collins. Their contact details can be found in the Call for Papers: English and Spanish

Planned date of publication: Winter 2021

Posted on 27 Oct 2020

Announcements

Call for Papers: Special Issue: Environmental Impacts of Illicit Economies

Posted on 22 Mar 2020