Victimization and offending in Mexico : the three-pronged security challenges of trafficking, kidnapping, and smuggling

Abstract

This special issue empirically interrogates the scholarship that in the name of security has been mobilized in contemporary Mexico. That is, the kind that has relied on the notion of organized crime as in the hands of networked and highly structured groups and of inherently violent and immoral criminals to frame and justify official policy and enforcement responses. These, rather than improving collective safety, have generated concerning levels of insecurity impacting all – including those constructed or labeled as criminal and their communities. The contributions constitute a selection of those presented at an international conference on Gender and Organized Crime sponsored by the Education for Justice (E4J) Initiative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which was held at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in July of 2018.