How Much of Baltimore's Violence is Political?

As some of you know, my main "beat" is civil violence, but since my return from Ghana, I've been thinking more about violence here stateside, particularly urban violence (actually, the interest ultimately comes from a conversation I had with one of our Ph.D. students before heading to Liberia about "resilient communities," but that's another story).

As even more of you may know, my home turf of Baltimore is a pretty violent place (28XX Greenmount Ave?  Basically right around the corner from my house).  If you're not aware of this, jeepers, go watch The Wire already.  It's only Februrary, and so far we've had 16 homicides (see the sidebar).  In 2011, Baltimore had a total of 196 murders, and that was a significant drop from the 300+ murders per year the city had been seeing in the 1990s.  For comparison, the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset counts you as having an armed conflict if there are 25 battlefield deaths per year.  And the Correlates of War datasets count you as having an intra-state war if there are at least 1,000 deaths per year (the same overall number is used for their newer non-state war dataset) - but in a whole country.

Of course, the difference between Baltimore and, say, Darfur, is supposed to be that the violence in Baltimore isn't political.

Which raises the question that's started to tickle the back of my head - how should we decide which violence to count as "political" or not?  That matters a lot for responses to it, among other things.  We tend to respond to political violence with things like negotiation, mediation, counterinsurgency, or military suppression.  We respond to crime with policing, enforcement, imprisonment, and the like (of course, part of the interesting issue is that the paradigms have been converging to some extent, but let's leave that aside for the moment).  Though, on the one hand, responses to political violence can be more heavy-handed, they can also be more comprehensive - we typically don't see people proposing that the mayor of Baltimore should sit down with the heads of the most powerful drug crews and work out a negotiated settlement.  This also links up, for the civil violence geeks, with the greed/grievance distinction.

The UCDP/PRIO dataset only counts violence that results from a contest between state and non-state actors, where there is some "incompatibility" between their positions - roughly, when there is a political goal.  And COW requires something similar, plus internal organization for violence.  I think, probably, at least a good number of Baltimore drug crews could meet the internal organization criterion.

So what about the political contest criterion?  That's the interesting one.  Certainly, drug crews in Baltimore haven't come out with position statements criticizing particular government policies, and they're not trying to take over the mayor's office.  So the answer might seem easy.

But I don't think it is, at least maybe not.  There are lots of groups that we easily think of as "political" violent actors that don't have much of a political platform.  Consider, e.g., the Mai Mai of the DR Congo.  The Mai Mai are largely rooted in communal self-defense groups, and as groups may not have strong ideological ambitions.  There are a whole bunch of them - many of whom don't have much in the way of political platforms besides wanting a larger piece of the action (though some do).

Of course, they are linked to the political conflict in the DRC in other ways - most crucially, they would likely not exist if not for the fact that communities in the Eastern DRC do not feel that the government can effectively protect them from crime and violence.  In fact, one of the very typical analyses of the persistence of anti-state armed factions is that they provide "law and order services."

So, what about gangs and crews in US cities?  They may not be so different.  In some areas, they serve as a kind of de facto provider of law and order, or at least of rough security.  The most prominent (and perhaps romanticized) example of this is the mafia, but you also hear plenty of stories of young men (especially, though not only men) joining gangs and crews for self-protection (echoes of Nozick!).  Violent political groups also often provide a sense of belonging/identity, and/or are built up around that sense (though the group identity may be endogenous to the insecurity, rather than pre-existing - see, e.g., Kalyvas).

Nor does the fact that the crews in Baltimore lack manifestos necessarily mean they don't have a politics.  "Stop Snitchin'" is an ideological stance.  It is, essentially, a claim against the legitimacy of the police and other governmental enforcement agencies.  If it were just a naked attempt at intimidation, the DVDs wouldn't have become popular and taken up by entertainers.  Kennedy's Don't Shoot talks a lot about the conspiracy theories that circulate in poor urban neighborhoods in the US - particularly beliefs that the government/CIA created crack cocaine to destroy black neighborhoods, and that the police are actively conspiring to jail the population.  Baltimore drug crews may not have position papers and electoral arms, but they certainly seem to be created and sustained by a - broadly speaking - political milieu.

That political milieu also complicates the question of whether their use of violence is for political ends.  As critics of the greed/grievance distinction have pointed out, in situations where individuals seek control over resources because they believe that they have been unjustly denied resources that they need in order to have control over their own lives, it's not clear that it makes sense to call this "greed," in a way that makes it apolitical (think also of the London riots last year, or Greek riots over austerity measures).

At the same time, we shouldn't be too romantic about motivations.  There's a counter-tendency among some lefty critics to look at all crime and urban violence in the US and see a resistance to state power, or to argue that the adoption of paramilitary techniques by domestic police indicates that there is a power struggle between the repressive state and forces of liberation.  That seems too simplistic and maybe too idealistic - it strikes me as just as likely that violent groups in Baltimore, even if "political," are themselves repressive and at least no better than the state.  To use a civil conflict concept, they may themselves be engaged in violent processes of quasi-state-building, that are at least as repressive and destructive as the control efforts of the state.  Or, even from a hard-left perspective, the violence done by drug crews may itself be part of a structure of repressive state power, that far from liberating the people in the area, helps to justify their further repression, as part of a system that "governs through crime."  After all, one of the depressing observations about urban violence in the US is that it is largely a matter of the poor (and often black) killing the poor (and often black).  It's not as if I live in fear of the uprising in Charles Village.

Anyway, all of this is just a start at organizing some thoughts on the topic.  This is the kind of thing that keeps your professors up at night!