The Conclusion first summarizes the study’s findings. It then presents the study’s policy implications that might help inform local actors’ decisions on interventions related to police–citizen cooperation in communities with criminal groups. Additional research questions are also proposed. In particular, how the study’s findings might relate to contexts experiencing political violence such as civil war or insurgency remains an avenue for future research. The final section highlights that populations are projected to grow fastest in countries with strong criminal groups and weak state institutions for fighting those groups. This trend increases the urgency to understand vacuums of justice and how they might be filled.

This chapter lays out the study’s research design. The design aims to enhance cycles of silence theory’s generalizability at two levels. At a macro level, the goal is to increase the potential that, contingent on local factors, the theory applies to as many of the communities facing criminal group violence as possible. It does so by drawing on logic derived from human social psychological dynamics, leveraging a wide range of existing datasets including a global survey of 109,000 citizens, and studying communities both the Global North (Baltimore, Maryland) and Global South (Lagos, Nigeria). At a micro level, the design combines cross-national data with original surveys as well as interviews and first- hand observations in Baltimore and Lagos. This multimethod approach improves the likelihood that the findings from the surveys and interviews in Baltimore and Lagos accurately reflect cooperation dynamics in the cities. Finally, the chapter provides definitions for key terms related to the study’s main actors – criminal groups, police, and citizens – and the main outcome of citizen cooperation with the police.

This chapter explains the motivation for the study. A stark reality is that states often fail to provide justice in many communities enduring criminal group violence. Deaths from criminal group violence roughly equal deaths from war between states, intrastate conflict (namely, civil war and insurgency), and terrorism combined. Moreover, criminal group affiliates who engage in the violence do so with near impunity in many communities. Criminal groups’ ability to escape accountability means that these communities face what I term vacuums of justice. The chapter goes on to argue that justice provision is a core responsibility of the state and, by failing in this regard, states shirk one of their raisons d’être (reasons for existence) under the social contract. The chapter’s final section explains the link between justice provision and cooperation with the police, positing that the police’s reliance on information from witnesses often makes cooperation a necessary albeit insufficient linchpin for justice provision.

The Introduction previews cycles of silence theory, which seeks to explain how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. The Introduction focuses on laying out the book’s central contributions. Theoretically, the book provides a new explanation for how criminal groups prevent cooperation with the police, highlighting the role of their violence in suppressing perceived norms favoring cooperation. The theory speaks to the political science literatures on state-building, political conflict, and criminal governance as well as literatures from other social science disciplines including criminology. Methodologically, the study bridges research divides between the Global North and Global South by testing the theory in both regions. The study also employs realistic survey experiments including a virtual reality–based survey experiment. Finally, the Introduction puts the study into perspective: While the book’s focus may be centered around the effect of violence, the violence should not be interpreted as a defining feature of communities that endure criminal groups.

This chapter details cycles of silence theory explaining how criminal groups constrain citizen cooperation with the police. Criminal group violence not only reduces cooperation by heightening retaliation risk to cooperators but also by making community norms favoring cooperation appear weaker than they are to citizens. Due to violence- induced retaliation risk, citizens who support cooperation are forced to keep that support private. The potency of social norms in driving human behavior means that this suppression of norms that favor cooperation ultimately reduce witnesses’ willingness to come forward with information. The chapter also interrogates the theory’s central premise that underlying support for cooperation exists in communities. Perceptions of police and criminal group legitimacy are an important driver of support, so cycles of silence dynamics primarily operate in communities where criminal groups have failed to gain legitimacy. The chapter then theorizes why criminal groups’ primary goal of illicit economic gain undermines their legitimization efforts.

The objective of this chapter is to explore the potential of the partial-organization concept as applied to the analysis of inter-firm networks as a form of economic governance that is created, reproduced or transformed with the help of network management practices. Key insights that the partial-organization perspective can provide into the process and the outcome of organizing and managing inter-firm networks are discussed. Inter-firm networks are conceived as partial organization of more or less complete formal organizations. Under specific circumstances, inter-firm networks could even be considered, at least in some aspects, as being even more organized than organizations. With regard to insights into the dynamics of this organizational form the chapter argues that the concept of partial organization helps to understand the development of this form from initial market relationships as well as from hierarchical organizations

In this chapter, we explore the usefulness of applying the idea of partial organization as one way of mitigating the confusion surrounding the notion of organized crime. We examine three types of collectivities that are usually seen as examples of organized crime: outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCs), street gangs, and mafias. When we examine the occurrence of organizational elements, we find substantial differences among these three cases not only in the amount of their organization, but also in the ways in which they are organized. A few multinational outlaw motorcycle gangs have gradually been able to form strong formal organizations containing all organizational elements. For a mafia, the situation is quite the opposite. Because its embeddedness in kinship relationships provides cohesion and protection, it needs little organization. Through its strong kinship ties, a mafia has access to several functional equivalents to the organizational elements one can find in OMCs. In street gangs the appearance of organizational elements varies among the gangs, and they rarely have more than a few elements at any one time. One obstacle for the organization of street gangs is their local embeddedness and limited duration, which loosen the boundaries of the gang.