Why gangs matter

Gangs are critical to understanding the world we live in, argues Dennis Rogers in his inaugural lecture.

Urban violence is on the rise worldwide, but cities have long been associated with danger, largely due to a perception that urban contexts are inherently disorderly spaces. Widely considered fundamentally brutal and destructive social phenomena, gangs occupy a key position within this particular global imaginary of urban insecurity, repeatedly represented across time and space as primary sources of violence in cities. Numerous studies, from the Chicago School of Sociology’s foundational gang ethnographies in the 1920s and 1930s to more contemporary explorations of the phenomena in cities of the so-called “Global South”, have however highlighted how such a gangster imaginary is deeply flawed.

Drawing on some of these, as well as my own ongoing longitudinal ethnographic research on gang dynamics in Nicaragua, my lecture will elaborate on three gang-related tropes – “gang governance”, “gangsters as infrastructure”, and “gangland urbanism” – in order to make the intellectual and empirical case for why gangs matter.

D. Rodgers, professor of International Development Studies: Why Gangs Matter.

This event is open to the public.