Victimization, offending and resistance in Mexico : toward critical discourse and grounded methodologies in organized crime research

Abstract

Granted, critical, empirically-based research on highly politicized criminalized practices is difficult to carry out. And therefore citing the clandestine nature of illicit markets, or often legitimate concerns over personal safety, many scholars and policy makers have turned to study Mexico’s security landscape from afar, in places completely inaccessible to those whose lives they so meticulously if un-empirically chronicle. Our collective goal through this special issue is to demonstrate that when examined from the field, these so-called criminal underworlds – fabricated in the safe confines of think tanks and academic institutions – are constituted, rather than by mafia-like criminals, by ordinary people doing the best they can to survive.