About the event: Criminal violence claims more lives globally than interstate and civil wars combined, yet it remains concentrated in certain regions while others escape this scourge. This project explains both why criminal violence is high in some places and not others, and why it becomes particularly intractable in democracies. While authoritarian regimes can avoid criminal violence through brutal repression or state-criminal collusion, democracies often become trapped in cycles where policy shocks – from housing demolitions to kingpin arrests to immigration enforcement – disrupt power balances between criminal groups and spark turf violence that mobilizes voters to demand “iron-fist” security policies and parties to compete on militarized security platforms. These policies tend to further shock the criminal distribution of power, locking countries in escalating cycles of criminal violence. Drawing on fine-grained data, ethnographic research, cross-national analysis, and case studies across Chicago, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia, the project examines how democratic responses often perpetuate these vicious cycles, and offers evidence-based policy alternatives for breaking them.

About the speaker: Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of Organized Violence After Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Gregory Luebbert Prize from the American Political Science Association. Her research spans war and peace, democracy, organized crime, and Latin America, and has appeared in International Security, World Politics, and British Journal of Political Science, among other outlets. Daly holds a BA from Stanford, MS from LSE, and PhD from MIT.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.