Marseille is a city that has long been sensationalistically associated in the public imagination with crime and drug dealing. This article begins by tracing the history of drug dealing and gang violence in the city, from its 19 th century origins to the rise of what has been called the “French Connection” in the 1960s and 1970s, when Marseille played a central role in the global heroin trade. The city’s criminality subsequently became more local in scope in the 1980s and 1990s, and the second part of the article draws on recent research carried out in the Marseille cité of Félix-Pyat, a poor neighbourhood widely associated with gang violence and drug dealing, to explore the consequences of the changing nature of crime in the city for process of “criminal governance”. When considered historically and in relation to our previous research on gangs in Nicaragua and South Africa, we suggest that it might be appropriate to talk about there being “varieties” of criminal governance that come together as “assemblages” than can be constituted in fundamentally different ways.

This article explores how and to what extent collaborative ethnographic fieldwork enables comparison both inherently and in practical terms. More often than not, ethnographic comparison involves the juxtaposition of studies carried out separately by individuals and relates to comparing arguments rather than empirical incidents. This obscures important contextual specificities across research sites and dilutes the comparative endeavor. We argue that it is necessary to be transparent about the way empirical data are produced for meaningful comparative analysis to be generated. One promising way to ensure this is through a reciprocal engagement with each other's field sites by means of joint fieldwork. This form of collaboration iteratively produces a combination of empirical experiences of bafflement on the one hand and forces the dialogical integration of different epistemological perspectives on the other, which we label "epistemo-methodological disjunctures." Drawing empirically on our collaborative ethnographic research on gang dynamics in Nicaragua and South Africa, we describe how questions surrounding the nature of the object being studied, the practicalities of collaborative comparative ethnography including the importance of understanding each other's "ethnographic ground zero," and the need to reconcile epistemological differences all emerged as critical to shaping the possibilities of comparison.

This article explores the longitudinal dynamics of youth gang transformation in urban Nicaragua. On the basis of an overview of successive gang iterations that have emerged over the past 30 years in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, the article identifies key elements for the articulation of a political economy of both change and stability. In particular, drawing on Bourdieusian theory, it conceives of a gang as a “social field” rather than as a discrete organizational form. It traces how different processes of individual and collective capital accumulation underpinning the social order promulgated by distinct gang iterations emerge and interact with each other, and the consequences that this has for their evolution over time. In doing so, the article offers a better understanding of the logic of what might be termed “gang rule(s)”.

Nicaragua is often held up as an exception within the Central American panorama of criminal violence, widely presented as the safest country in the region due to its particular revolutionary legacies, the (supposed) absence of transnational gangs and drug-trafficking organisations, and the National Police's representation as an efficient and professional force. This commentary proposes an alternative reading of Nicaragua's contemporary political economy of violence in order to reveal the profoundly misleading nature of this prevalent view. In particular, it highlights how Nicaragua is governed through a particular political 'settlement' underpinned by drug trafficking, police and judicial corruption, as well as 'mafia state' governance. These factors have coalesced to establish a highly efficient and engrained 'narco-state' whose undoing is unlikely in the short term.

Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua's capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not).

There exists a long tradition of works drawing on life histories within the field of gang studies.Beginning with the pioneering volumes by Chicago sociologists Clifford Shaw (The Jack-Roller, 1930) and Edwin Sutherland (The Professional Thief, 1937), through to more recent works such Ralph Cintron's Angels' Town (1998), Marie-Hélène Bacqué and Lamence Madzou's J'étais un Chef de Gang (2008), or Robert Gay's Bruno (2015), they constitute an important sub-genre, moreover often centrally integrated in more ecumenical studies of

Gangs are often associated with violence and chaos, but they can also be institutional vectors for the imposition of particular forms of social order, based on their members’ status as locally hegemonic “violence experts”. This “gang governance” is often exclusive and volatile, however, and its underlying logic can easily change. Instances of the latter are frequently connected to generational turnovers within gangs. An obvious question in this regard is how old and new gang members interact with each other, especially in circumstances where the rules and norms upheld by the latter become detrimental to the former. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores the conflicts that emerged between different generations of gang members following the gang’s transformation from a vigilante self-defence group to a predatory drug-dealing organisation, and what these might mean for the notion of gang governance.

ABSTRACTDrawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. The first part of the article explores the variable morality surrounding different types of criminal activities that local gang members engaged in during the 1990s and 2000s. The second part considers my experiences running a local market stall, describing the contrasting reactions I faced when I resorted to first legal, and then illegal, strategies to boost my revenue levels. Taken together, these examples showcase how the social legitimization of an economic activity has less to do with whether it is legal or illegal, but rather the future aspirations it embodies.

I first travelled to Nicaragua in July 1996, as an anthropology graduate student searching for what the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has evocatively described as “the time of beautiful madness” (“el tiempo de hermosa locura”). The celebrated Sandinista revolution that his expression refers to held sway in Nicaragua between 1979 and 1990, and had been an important contributing factor to the development of my political consciousness as a teenager. Although I was six years too late to experience at first hand what seemed from afar to have been an exceptional moment of social effervescence and experimentation, unlike the “revolutionary widows” that Galeano describes so well, moving from one Third World revolution to another, loving them tenderly as they unfold but leaving them when disenchantment sets in, I was determined to uncover the legacy of this particular revolution that had so influenced me, and see at first hand what changes it had wrought on Nicaraguan society. I consequently went to Nicaragua with a doctoral research project that aimed to investigate the means through which individuals and communities were creatively organising themselves socially and culturally in order to cope with the economic crisis and insecurity that were widely reported to be characteristic of post-revolutionary Nicaragua at the time, hoping – on the basis of my personal

Visions of gangs as pathological embodiments of violence and disorder are commonplace, whether in policy-making circles, among law enforcement officials, or the general public at large. At the same time, however, there also exists a rich and long-standing tradition of research on gangs highlighting how they can be institutional vectors for the imposition and promotion of particular types of local social structuration. The mechanisms through which they achieve this can clearly vary significantly, both between and within specific contexts, and are not very well understood. The potential relationship between what might be termed "ordering" and "disordering" process associated with gangs is particularly opaque. Drawing on over 20 years of longitudinal ethnographic research in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, this chapter traces the way that different iterations of the local gang have emerged, transformed, and disappeared over time in order to explore the underlying nature of the local governance that these have provided.