Through an analysis of Jacob Ross’s 1999 story ‘Rum an Coke’, this chapter examines the role of rum in contemporary literature, both as an emblem of the Caribbean and a commodity historically connected to slavery and the plantation economy. As both noun and adjective, word and thing, rum is peculiarly open for language play characteristic of ‘the literary’ and productive for examining the silences and echoes of colonialism in everyday life. By tracking substitutions across commodities in the story—sugar, rum, Coca-Cola, and cocaine—the role of the United States and Europe becomes central to material conditions in contemporary Grenada. Stereotypes about alcohol and drug use deflect historicization of these conditions as legacies of colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean. Through this method, I suggest that reading commodities in historical perspective can frustrate colonialist interpretive circuits to reckon ethically with the past and speculate on postcolonial futures.

This chapter explores the ongoing and novel merging of gold mining with organized crime, highlighting the relation of drug trafficking, land grabbing, and other related sectors to deforestation. The recent gold-mining expansion and boom in the Amazon is linked to gold markets and the global political economy. The chapter scrutinizes the rise of narco-gold mining, linking drug trade, organized criminal groups, and money laundering with rainforest gold and the surge of authoritarian and mafia-like power. During the Bolsonaro era there was a significant deepening of the link between gold-mining activities and organized drug traffickers and criminal networks. In southwestern Pará, gold mining is the leading cause of deforestation inside areas like the upper Tapajós Munduruku Indigenous lands near Jacareacanga. This chapter utilizes field research experiences, interviews, and ethnographic observations to illustrate the complex dilemmas faced by communities currently being pressured and divided by increasing gold extraction in their territories. In the end of the chapter the discussion turns to solutions for how to address these and other root causes of deforestation in political economy.

Globally, progress has been made in relation to the abolition of the death penalty. However, to maintain the “war on drugs”, East and Southeast Asia have adopted the most punitive responses to drug possession, use, trafficking, and production. The most extreme response has been the death penalty. Its presence in the East and Southeast Asia region continues to be regarded as an effective measure of deterrence, although several countries have invoked moratoriums or eliminated the mandatory component in its application. This chapter examines the context of the death penalty for drug trafficking in the region, particularly its role in shaping sentencing rationales in neighbouring abolitionist states. Hong Kong is an important case to consider as it is a locale within the region with a historical reputation as one of the major international transshipment sites, and while it does not have the death penalty like many of its neighbours, it metes out “harsh but consistent sentences.”

While most scholars of criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro attribute its origins to the prison-based factions which formed during the military dictatorship (1964–85), this chapter argues that these arrangements emerged before, in the homes and on the streets and alleyways of the city’s favelas and housing projects. This chapter investigates these origins by focusing on the first embryonic gangs in Complexo da Maré in the 1970s. Combining archival research with oral histories of longtime residents, the chapter documents the emergence of Maré’s gangs after a variety of other non-state actors that had previously provided governance were increasingly marginalized during Brazil’s military dictatorship and as the abusive practices of police became more widespread. Maré’s incipient gang networks quickly began to compete over valuable drug-selling turf and, as the more successful ones consolidated territorial control, they expanded their organizations and governance activities. The chapter concludes with a description of the history of Rio’s prison-based factions and the marriage between these two organizational forms as the favela-based gangs integrated into these citywide networks.

This epilogue describes the author’s final interview with Severino, a former gang member and one of the principal interlocutors of the project. It describes his circumstances following his exit from the gang and the prospects for his future.

This chapter begins by motivating the puzzles the book seeks to answer. Why do Rio de Janeiro’s drug-trafficking gangs govern neighborhoods? Why do some of these gangs rely on violence and coercion while others resolve disputes, offer welfare, and organize cultural activities for residents? This book argues that gangs govern in these ways because they need the obedience and support of local residents to survive amid shifting relations with rival gangs and the police. This chapter outlines a theory of criminalized governance which revolves around the relations that emerge between gang members and residents within distinct security environments. This theoretical framework builds on three traditions that view criminalized governance akin to processes of state formation, rebel governance, or state perversion. Finally, this chapter outlines its mixed method approach, and describes the methodological and ethical considerations involved in eighteen months of participant observation in three rival gang territories, 206 semi-structured interviews with residents and gang members, and the collection of more than 400 archival documents and a dataset of more than 20,000 anonymous denunciations.

The third of Maré’s gangs, Terceiro Comando Puro (TCP), controls an enormous territory, encompassing ten contiguous neighborhoods with an estimated population of 68,000 residents, more than twice that of Maré’s Comando Vermelho-connected gangs. Moreover, TCP’s turf has changed significantly over time as the gang has lost and won territory through violent battles with several rivals, which have had horrifying consequences for both gang members and residents. This chapter also shows how the nature of enforcement against gangs can shift radically as TCP developed highly collaborative relations with the police especially after 2009. The chapter traces these developments in TCP’s historic territories as well as the housing projects that they would control from the mid-1990s until 2002 and again after 2009. This chapter interweaves multiple types of data, including eighteen months participant observation, dozens of interviews with current and former gang members and residents, as well as journalistic accounts and denunciations to an anonymous hotline, to trace how TCP’s shifting security environment has shaped their governance practices over time.

In April 2014, two months before the start of the World Cup, 2,500 Brazilian Army and Marine soldiers occupied Complexo da Maré. They would stay there for the next fifteen months. The occupation of Maré was the culmination of Rio’s once-heralded Police Pacification Units, a public security program intended to recapture the state’s monopoly of violence from drug-trafficking gangs in hundreds of favelas throughout the city. This chapter begins by tracing the confluence of factors which led to the Brazilian military’s intervention. A mix of participant observations, interviews, and newspaper accounts then document the military’s arrival and their various operations and activities to combat gangs and gain the support of the local population. The chapter proceeds to analyze how and why each of Maré’s gangs responded differently to the challenges of occupation, arguing that the military lacked the capacity to fully expel or dismantle them though their presence shifted the dynamics of rival competition and threat, which produced the divergent gang responses observed.

This chapter tests cycles of silence in Lagos to evaluate its applicability in a Global South context where, unlike Baltimore, the state and the police have limited resources. The chapter’s results come from an original survey of shopkeepers, paired with interviews and observation, in the city’s expansive markets, pockets in which “area boy” crews engage in violence and extortion. Consistent with the patterns found in Baltimore, area boy violence reduces cooperation by boosting perceived retaliation risk and making cooperation norms appear to be weaker than they are. Underlying cooperation support exists among shopkeepers, the chapter’s final section explains, in part, because the area boy crews have largely failed to gain legitimacy with Lagosians.

This chapter tests cycles of silence theory in Baltimore to evaluate its applicability in a Global North context where the state and the police are well resourced. It provides background on how Baltimore residents become exposed to violence by drug crews and details the results from an original survey of residents in the city’s violence- affected communities. Violence heightens perceived retaliation risk, and the heightened risk perception in turn pushes residents who support cooperation to keep that support private. As result, residents share less information than they otherwise would in absence of this norm suppression. The chapter’s final section explains that the underlying cooperation support exists, because the drug crews have largely failed to gain legitimacy in eyes of residents.

In the late 1980s, a winding series of drug trafficking charges against the then de facto leader of Panama, General Manuel Noriega, led the US government to seek his arrest, following a controversial military intervention into Panama, and trial before a US court. The rejection of his entitlement to foreign official immunity by the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida (a verdict affirmed by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals) culminated in an unprecedented decision at the time – long-term imprisonment of the Panamanian strongman in the United States. Not only did the Noriega court pave the way for subsequent prosecutions of top-tier state officials involved in drug trafficking in the United States, but it also brightly reverberated in the scholarly writing of successive decades concerning matters of head-of-state immunity. It also gained international notoriety and was hailed to be a “triumph for diplomacy and a triumph for justice.”

This chapter illustrates the disputes around the revolution frame discussed in Chapter 6 and the impact of these contests. Supplemented by interviews with government officials, police officers, soldiers, and other ex-combatants, this chapter examines the long-term effects of government framing strategies that demonize rebel actors who may later become political figures. In particular, this chapter looks at how the “narco-terrorist” framing utilizes women guerrillas in particular to discredit the FARC and ELN and positions the government as the savior for these women. But upon demobilization, decades of stigmatization from these framing contests mean that ex-combatant are in constant fear of being discovered and have to hide their pasts. Indeed, many of them have lost homes and jobs once “outed” as former rebels.