Jose Gutierrez Danton has new book published
Posted on Tuesday 3 March 2026
We argue that, while historically differentiated, politics and crime not only overlap but are co-constitutive, their borders being porous and oscillating historically. The decision about who and what is political (or not) has to be in itself processed politically, which involves class, national, and ethnic conflicts and the capacity of the concerned parties to perform and appeal to specific audiences.
Politics and criminality are thus both programmatically and socially separated, while at the same time, intimately linked. This discussion revisits theoretical contribution of classics such as Tilly and Elias, while at the same time engages with concrete case-studies from Latin America -Perú, Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela-, Asia -Burma-, and Europe -Serbia, Ireland/UK. Throughout these contributions, we discover that the line that divides the realms of the criminal from the politics is less solid as usually assumed, and that beyond normative assumptions, both, while separated historically, exist in a symbiotic relationship.