Within political science the study of the determinants of drug violence and the prevalence of criminal governance has become a burgeoning and exciting field. Even among the many excellent books on these subjects over the past decade, Hernán Flom’s The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America is poised to become essential reading for understanding variation in levels of violence in Latin America, the world’s most violent region. Whereas much of the literature focuses on how state actions shift the incentives of criminal groups or on the quasi-state functions of criminal organizations, Flom “brings the state back in” by offering a framework for understanding how partisan turnover and fragmentation shape politicians’ incentives to control their police, which in turn shape police and politicians’ incentives to regulate drug trafficking (albeit through informal means). Flom tests this theoretical framework with rich and ambitious comparative analysis in Argentina and Brazil, leveraging subnational variation between two metropolitan areas within each country—São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Greater Buenos Aires and Rosario in Argentina—as well as considerable within-case temporal variation.

The point of departure for Flom’s analysis is the striking variation in patterns of violence across four large metropolitan areas in Latin America, despite the prevalence of drug trafficking in all four contexts. He identifies four types of relationships between the state (politicians and police) and criminal groups: (1) coordinated coexistence, or explicit or implicit agreements between politicians/police and criminal actors; (2) protection rackets in which police and politicians extract rents from criminal groups for protection from rivals and the state itself; (3) particularistic negotiation, or uncoordinated bribe extraction from criminal groups by police officers or units without protection from politicians; and (4) particularistic confrontation, which entails indiscriminate attacks by police against drug trafficking organizations. The first two types generate relatively low levels of violence by both the state and criminal groups, whereas the latter two types result in high levels of violence and corruption.

Flom argues, and demonstrates convincingly, that these patterns of violence and state–criminal-group relationships are a function of the political incentives facing executives to grant police high levels of autonomy and to professionalize or politicize their police forces. Through rich case studies, Flom provides compelling evidence of how these political factors explain variation in levels of violence, a relationship that remains underexplored in the literature. He demonstrates, for instance, that low partisan turnover in São Paulo’s governorship and high partisan fragmentation in the legislature incentivized governors to professionalize the police, resulting in an enduring pact with the state’s dominant criminal organization, the PCC; this yielded some of the lowest homicide rates among Brazilian states. By contrast, high partisan turnover and fragmentation in Rio de Janeiro meant that politicians had few means by which to constrain police autonomy, yielding particularistic confrontation and high homicide rates for decades.

Flom’s theoretical framework and impressive comparative analysis make important contributions to several literatures, which should broaden the book’s appeal beyond scholars of security and policing. The book opens the “black box” of the state to lay bare the political calculations undergirding state responses to—and, at times, complicity with—Latin America’s high rates of violence. A key challenge for democracy in Latin America since the “third wave” of democratization has been precisely the inability of democratic governments throughout the region to rein in rampant crime and violence. Flom’s analysis points to one factor that may hinder the ability of democracies to meaningfully address crime and violence, highlighting how ordinary democratic politics may shift political leaders’ incentives toward extracting rents and otherwise concentrating power, rather than curbing drug violence and strengthening the rule of law. Relatedly, the book also elucidates a democratic dilemma regarding state responses to violence. On the one hand, political competition may facilitate reforms as much of the literature argues; as Flom shows, this “prevent[s] incumbents from engaging in police politicization, predatory rent-seeking and other abuses of power” (p. 204). On the other hand, as Flom also demonstrates, political competition can imperil the implementation and consolidation of reforms by facilitating policy instability and undermining police compliance. Flom’s work thus calls for greater attention to the design of democratic institutions to ensure that politicians’ incentives do not derail the essential state role of security provision.

The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America also raises important and provocative questions for scholars of bureaucracy. As Flom observes, much of this literature posits bureaucratic autonomy as a Weberian ideal that guarantees competent service provision while guarding against politicization and corruption. Flom’s analysis challenges these long-held assumptions about autonomy—which he defines as a bureaucracy’s “ability to control their internal governance and external operations without political interference” (p. 7)—demonstrating that these premises may not hold when it comes to the police. Rather than leading to improved outcomes, Flom demonstrates that high levels of police autonomy yield more indiscriminate violence and widespread corruption by facilitating the pursuit of particularistic arrangements with criminal groups. Even though Flom’s theory and analysis make an important contribution to the literature on bureaucratic autonomy, there is nevertheless a tension in the role of police in his theoretical framework. The theory posits that whether police are professionalized, politicized, or autonomous is solely a function of politicians’ incentives; police seem to have little agency in this account. Flom views police as “middlemen or brokers” (p. 27), even as he acknowledges that “police will usually not allow these encroachments on their autonomy without resistance” (p. 28). This suggests that our understanding of police autonomy and of the extent to which they are susceptible to political control would benefit from greater nuance and examination of the complex entanglements between politicians and police.

Flom is careful to point out repeatedly that his framework pertaining to autonomy is applicable to “weak institutional contexts,” but this carefully delineated scope condition also highlights a key limitation of the book. Although Flom is clear that his theory is intended to explain levels of violence in weak institutional contexts, he is less clear about the definition of such contexts. He specifies early in the book that state involvement or complicity with illicit activity is not simply a question of capacity, noting that “informal regulation does not equate to state absence or weakness” (p. 6). But state capacity or institutional strength (or weakness) is not well theorized in his framework, which tells us little about how state capacity relates to the four models of “informal regulation.” It is not clear, for instance, whether all four cases are presumed to be uniformly institutionally weak. This highlights an important future research agenda on state capacity and state illegality that builds on Flom’s work, one that heeds his call to focus more on the state in studies of drug violence and criminal governance.