How Civil Wars Help Explain Organized Crime—and How They Do Not

Abstract

Large-scale organized crime occupies a gray zone between ordinary crime and political violence. The unprecedented scale of drug-related crime in Mexico has led to its description as an insurgency or even a civil war, a conceptual move that draws on recent studies that have associated civil war with large-scale criminality. By questioning both the “crime as civil war” and “civil war as crime” models, I argue that instead of folding the two phenomena, we should draw primarily from the micro-dynamics of civil war research program to identify areas of potentially productive cross-fertilization. I point to four such areas, namely, onset and termination, organization, combat and violence, and governance and territory. I conclude by sketching a theoretical and empirical agenda for the study of large-scale organized crime.