Fight or Hide: Why Organized Criminal Groups Go to War with the State

William M. LeoGrande and Megan Kurten

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 2025, vol. 48, issue 7, 741-762

Abstract: The scholarship on criminal politics posits a range of confrontational and collaborative relationships between the state and organized criminal groups (OCGs). These relationships often result in equilibria, where the state maintains limited enforcement so long as OCGs limit violence. We examine what happens when that equilibrium is upset and ask why OCGs sometimes go to war against the state. We argue that OCGs will “fight” rather than adapt, or hide from, state enforcement when three conditions are met: (1) increased state enforcement threatens the criminal enterprise’s profitable continuity; (2) the OCG has the organizational capacity to wage war against the state; and (3) the criminal leadership has low linkage to the political class. We demonstrate this argument in six paired qualitative case studies in Sicily, Mexico, and Colombia, and we conclude with some advisory comments for avoiding criminal war.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2122109 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:uterxx:v:48:y:2025:i:7:p:741-762

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uter20

DOI: 10.1080/1057610X.2022.2122109

Access Statistics for this article

Studies in Conflict and Terrorism is currently edited by Bruce Hoffman

More articles in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().