Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and the State in Latin America

Eduardo Moncada is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College. His first book, "Cities, Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America," analyzes and explains the ways in which major developing world cities respond to the challenge of urban violence. It argues that political projects in response to urban violence are conditioned by and reflect the distribution of political power within cities. Such political projects are shaped by the interaction between urban political economies - referring to relations between the state and business - and patterns of armed territorial control within cities. Moncada constructs a comparative analyses of the institutional outcomes of the politics of urban violence in three major cities in Colombia.