Strong Communities, Weak States. Lynching in Latin America
Govinda Clayton and Enzo Nussio
Research Assistants: Alina Gäumann, Ana Maria Burgos, Clélia Savary, Sophia Johanna Schlosser, Reetta Välimäki, Stefanie Matter, María Murias Muñoz, Victor Muñoz Varela, Zoé Goy, Onerva Martikainen, Marco Grünenfelder, Maurus Dora, Victoria Haerter, Norman Kneubuehler, Nicolas Schmidheiny, Fernando González Adauto, María Cristina Gúzman Solís, and Liliana Martínez
2019 - present
States are responsible for the administration of justice within their territory. Yet when a state is unwilling or unable to deliver justice, extralegal agents can emerge to supplement, undermine, or replace the state. These non-state agents devise rules and deal out punishments for what they determine to be wrongdoing. There is now a bourgeoning body of work on rebels, criminal gangs and vigilante groups, demonstrating how these organizations can establish and enforce rules outside the state’s legal apparatus. This research reveals how extralegal justice is administered when powerful organizations are present. However, it fails to explain extralegal justice that emerges from the bottom up in the absence of the pressure, persuasion and protection of an organization, such as lynching.
Lynching is a public ritual whereby a group of civilians physically punishes a clearly inferior number of alleged wrongdoers. Lynch mobs use extreme forms of violence, such as killing through hanging, beating or burning. While lynching was common in the Southern US until early in the 20th century, lynching now often occurs in countries from Mexico to South Africa and India. In Brazil, for instance, more than one million people participated in acts of lynching over the past 60 years. In Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, one person died as a result of lynching every three days in 2014 and 2015. Despite these alarming numbers and the urgent need for policy intervention, there remains little systematic research on this topic.
Why do otherwise law-abiding communities take justice into their own hands using heinous and deadly forms of violence? And why do states not prevent it from occurring? We argue that a combination of strong communities and weak states are the necessary conditions for the emergence of bottom up justice. For strong community capacity, in essence the density of interactions and connections between members, can overcome the high barriers for collective action required to engage in brutal forms of violence, and insulate participants from the state’s threat of punishment. A strong community fulfils the role normally played by a permanent organization for other forms of extralegal justice. At the same time, local pockets of weak state capacity provide the opportunity for extralegal justice to occur.
To analyze these claims, this project adopts an innovative tri-part research design focusing on Latin America, a region where reports about lynching are particularly common. In study I, we will collect the first systematic event data on lynching across Latin America. With this data, we will identify the conditions associated with lynching across the region, extending previous research that has largely been based on limited cursory evidence. In study II, we will complement the macro analysis with an in-depth study of two communities in Bogotá to trace the mechanisms leading to lynching. In study III, we will develop a preventative strategy to reduce support for lynching. Working in collaboration with the Colombian Police, our intervention will attempt to strengthen dialogue between authorities and local community leaders.
In sum, this project aims to extend understandings of extralegal justice by identifying and analyzing the conditions associated with lynching. Using a combination of systematic event data, in-depth process tracing and a field experiment, the project will generate new data resources and an analytical framework that will facilitate researchers, practitioners and development agencies in their search for effective strategies to prevent and reduce violence in the name of justice.
As part of this project, we conduct a survey on security and values in Mexico-City. More information on this survey (in Spanish) can be found here.
For any queries relating to this project, please contact the CSS’ Dr. Enzo Nussio .