During one of my interviews with a Brazilian security official about the state’s battle against a prominent criminal organization, he observed that “there’s no such thing as the ‘parallel state’; it’s not parallel at all because sooner or later they intersect.” A growing literature, particularly in the Latin American context, examines the causes and consequences of crime and violence, and a new set of scholars has pushed this field of study forward by exploring the role of armed criminal organizations as political actors. Yet this literature largely remains at the margins of the broader discipline, with little conversation between scholars studying crime and violence and those studying other political processes, such as elections, policymaking, state capacity, and state-society relations. As the security official’s observation suggests, however, there is much to be unearthed regarding the “intersections” of criminal actors and the state, and the implications of these linkages for political outcomes.

Scholars often reference Latin America’s “twin transitions” during the 1980s, a period characterized by two simultaneous and deeply intertwined transformations toward democratic rule and market economies governed by neoliberal principles. But Latin American countries could be said to have undergone a third transition that also shaped the development of democratic practices and state institutions. Dramatic shifts in the nature of crime and violence began during the early democratic period and rendered Latin America the most violent region in the world. In recent decades, Latin America’s democracies have had to contend with a range of security problems that have posed considerable challenges to governability, stability, and the rule of law. From organized criminal groups and transnational drug trafficking to spikes in street crime and homicide rates, or simply a sharp rise in fear of crime, it is a phenomenon from which few, if any, countries have been immune. Accordingly, in Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean and in Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America, Enrique Desmond Arias and Eduardo Moncada, respectively, demonstrate that it is impossible to understand modern politics in Latin America without analyzing the nature and effects of violence.

Charles Tilly argued years ago that patterns of state formation in Europe could be explained by looking to two factors: the capacity to exercise coercion—that is, to make war and provide internal security—and the nature and concentration of capital from which the state could extract resources to finance its coercive apparatus (Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States A.D. 990–1992 [1993]). Arias and Moncada implicitly take up Tilly’s framework, exploring local-level state formation as a function of the state’s coercive apparatus and the sector that controls capital. They update Tilly for a contemporary Latin American context, however, by incorporating into their respective analyses the role of armed criminal organizations, not just as challengers to the state but also as actors that are often deeply embedded within the state.

With this important corrective, Arias and Moncada set out to address fundamental research questions about contemporary state formation in Latin America. Moncada seeks to explain variation in state strategies to reestablish a monopoly of violence, focusing on security policies in three Colombian cities. Arias, meanwhile, asks about the implications of armed groups for governance, specifically how they shape political life and processes. Both present novel theoretical frameworks at the nexus of coercion, capital, and crime, elucidating how what Moncada calls “political projects” (Cities, Business, p. 2) are a function of the interactions among state, business, and criminal actors.

Arias seeks to explain the effects of criminal actors on local security and order, civic life, elections, and policy delivery. In doing so, he presents a rich conceptual framework for understanding what he calls “micro-level armed regimes” (Criminal Enterprises, p. 3). Micro-level armed regimes are defined by the organizational structure of the armed group (particularly degree of consolidation), as well as the type of linkage between the armed group and state actors, which can be collaborative, confrontational, or mixed. Arias shows convincingly that there is considerable variation in micro-level armed regimes, not only within countries but even within the same city; the result is radically different modes of governance in different neighborhoods that are formally under the same political system.

Arias’s comparison of ordinary political life in two Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods is especially compelling. In Rocinha, a consolidated drug gang with a confrontational or mixed relationship with the state allows for a vibrant civil society despite a tenuous order, but undermines citizens’ trust in state actors. In Rio das Pedras, meanwhile, a consolidated militia with collaborative ties to state actors provides reliable order—“we have commerce, security and transport,” says one resident (ibid., p. 129)—but civic mobilization and electoral campaigns are highly constrained, to such an extent that such activity may come at the expense of one’s security. Arias’s meticulous analysis of neighborhoods in Medellín and Kingston documents similar contrasts. Overall, he presents a comprehensive account of the embededdedness of criminal organizations in the dominant political structures in the context of each city.

Moncada draws on similar variables to account for local-level state responses to violence in three Colombian cities, but he focuses on one dimension that remains underexplored in Arias’s account, the role of business. Like Arias, Moncada emphasizes the importance of the degree of consolidation of the armed criminal group, which he calls “armed territorial control” (Cities, Business, p. 3), as well as the role of state actors. Moncada rightfully critiques the all-too-common practice of excluding business in studies of violence, an important stakeholder whose influence in shaping state responses and outcomes has been underestimated and underexplored. He thus incorporates into his framework a thorough analysis of how the nature of the business sector shapes its preferences over security policy, while the degree of cohesion and engagement with the state shapes its ability to influence the government’s political project. The author shows, for instance, how the agriculture-dominant business sector in the city of Cali, with a preference for a repressive security program, helped derail what he calls a “participatory political project” (ibid., p. 2) focused on violence prevention, and actively challenged the state by serving as an alternate funding stream for the police and its repressive activities. Bogotá’s preventive and participatory program, meanwhile, flourished, in part due to a cohesive service-sector-oriented business community that saw such a program as a means of attracting foreign investment.

By means of these novel conceptual frameworks and well-researched comparative analyses, the authors make notable contributions to a range of literatures, shedding light on an important omitted variable in studies of political processes in Latin America. Researchers focused on elections and political parties in the region and beyond, for instance, should consider how the direct incorporation of criminal gangs into political parties, as Arias documents in Kingston, or the informal regulation of campaign and partisan activity by armed groups in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, shape party strategies and electoral outcomes. Policy scholars, meanwhile, should be attentive to Moncada’s account of how policy design was shaped by both licit and illicit enterprises, and Arias’s evidence of how “coproduction” (Criminal Enterprises, p. 207) and policy delivery may occur not through organized civil society but through organized crime.

This point should add considerable nuance to research on participatory democracy, a much-celebrated political innovation in contemporary Latin America. Consider, for instance, how what Moncada calls Medellín’s participatory political project of civic incorporation and social inclusion is challenged by Arias’s analysis of how armed actors intervened and came to dominate the city’s participatory budgeting processes. Taken together, the authors provide a rich framework for understanding Latin America’s “third transition,” unpacking the mechanisms through which armed criminal actors have shaped the construction of democracy and the linkages between ordinary citizens and the state.

At the same time, while the two books share a critical view of macro-level approaches in political science that ignore internal variation and micro-level politics, their city- and neighborhood-level analyses also share an important shortcoming. Both scholars begin by situating their analyses within broader national and regional historical processes—including armed conflict, decolonialization, migration, and the development of the drug trade—that provide a necessary context for their rich studies of local-level processes. But neither author provides a framework for explaining how these micro-level processes scale up, and what they tell us about regional or national patterns of crime and violence, political outcomes, or modes of state formation. The omission of this broader analysis is also glaring given the transnational nature of the drug trade and the criminal organizations that dominate it. This scaling up is important for understanding politics at the national and state levels, for example, which is where decisions about policing and security policy are made in Colombia and Brazil, respectively.

Thinking about politics across these multiple scales presents a ripe opportunity for future research, particularly as broader processes, such as Colombia’s peace agreement and Brazil’s growing economic and political crisis, raise questions about the repercussions for, and effects, of micro-level politics and state-formation processes. With these important and timely new books, Arias and Moncada advance this multilevel research agenda in significant ways, demonstrating that we cannot explain these macro-level outcomes without understanding the agency and interactions of state, business, and criminal actors in micro-level contexts.