On October 15, 2022, the American Society of Criminology’s Division of International Criminology (DIC) recognized Eduardo Moncada, assistant professor of political science, as the recipient of the 2022 Outstanding Book Award for “Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America.” The work, published as part of the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series, covers the understudied problem of criminal extortion in Latin America.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Colombia, El Salvador, and Mexico, Moncada examines how victims resist criminal extortion under increasingly difficult circumstances. His project uses a new framework of analysis that draws on interviews, focus groups, and participatory drawing exercises to study varying methods of resistance. The analysis traces and compares processes that lead to individual acts of everyday resistance, including sporadic killings by ad hoc groups of victims and police, institutionalized and sustained collective vigilantism, and coordination between victims and states to co-produce order in ways that both strengthen and undermine the rule of law.