Like most cities, the Medellín Mayor’s Office and the Colombian police focus their efforts on managing what they measure--homicides and violent crime. While of course there are legitimate reasons to tackle violence, there is relatively less attention to other deleterious effects of SOC: high levels of civilian extortion, criminal political control of civilians, criminal capture of local state and community governments, retail drug sales, and so forth. In addition to being costly in and of themselves, these actions also undermine the local control and legitimacy of the state. We believe that these harmful consequences are overlooked in part because they are not measured. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting a wide variety of metrics on SOC and establish the practice of collecting, monitoring, and using these metrics for policy analysis and program/policy design and evaluation.

This project applies lessons from irregular warfare to countering organized crime. Irregular warfare is often defined as a violent competition over legitimacy, and it subsumes the problems of terrorism, insurgency, and political instability. Phase 1 of this research project established the commonalities between organized crime and irregular warfare: their shared nature and the pitfalls relating to response. On this basis, Phase 2 presents a Framework for Analysis and Action originally designed for irregular warfare but adapted here to the context of organized crime. The Framework consists of two “parts”: the Strategic Estimate (which maps the problem, explores its drivers, frames, and strategies, and critiques the current response) and the Course of Action (which uses the Estimate to design an appropriate strategy, complete with a theory of success, phasing, assumptions, and metrics). In a third phase of this project, the modified framework will be tested through application to key cases.

This research analyses the drivers of armed violence linked to organised crime. It is a scoping exercise of the academic and policy literature on organised crime and violence, looking closely at the evidence related to causes of violence linked specifically to organised crime. It also briefly analyses some important trends in research on environmental and societal factors influencing the likelihood of criminal violence. It provides brief case studies that illustrate different drivers at play.