A growing body of scholarship has examined the rise in criminal violence across Latin America since the turn of the twenty-first century, a trend some observers attribute to the expansion of drug trafficking organizations. Some research focused on criminal gangs has tended to overlook questions of centralization, whereas other studies have examined this violence by focusing on cartel-state relations, inter-cartel violence, or interactions between cartels and local communities. Nicholas Barnes's Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro advances this literature by examining all three dimensions in the context of criminal gangs. He analyzes how and why the social contract between residents and organized gangs in Complexo da Maré shifts over time. Barnes argues that gangs govern within two dimensions—coercion and the provision of goods and services—that affect not only the levels of violence but also the conditions that allow these gangs to survive.

After three years of multimethod fieldwork, including ethnographic observation, interviews, archival research, and newspaper analysis, Barnes shows that gang behavior is influenced not only by profits but also by the expectations of community members and state security forces. The depth of his ethnographic engagement allows him to examine gang b