At the start of the year, my article “Criminal Communication: Public Representations, Repertoires, and Regimes of Criminal Governance” was published by Perspectives on Politics. It was an absolute doozy of a process to get it out and into the world.
“Criminal Communication” is the distillation of a lot of my dissertation research. The puzzle and case studies in the article are recognizable in my dissertation, but I had to boil down much of the dissertation to get to the absolute core of the argument. That’s about 73,000 words boiled and boiled down to a 13,000-word article (plus 5,000-word appendix).
I submitted the manuscript to Perspectives in May 2023, while I was still based in New York and teaching at Princeton. I’d just accepted my job at Flinders Uni, and optimistically hoped I might have an article published around the time I started the new job. But the review process took a year longer than that, about 20 months. The process – the most detailed and rigorous I’ve ever been involved in – involved five reviewers and three rounds of revisions.
These reviews pummeled the bandit out of manuscript. My first version of the manuscript leaned heavily on some concepts – roving bandit and stationary bandit – which are well-known in political science, but aren’t really about crime at all. Or about crime only in the sense that all politics could be said to share something with crime and banditry. The concepts were a distraction, but I had a hard time moving past them. I defended their inclusion. Eventually the reviewers convinced me to just cut them out. Pummeling the bandit out, leaving me more room for what I’d actually wanted to get to all along.
Here’s the bandit-free abstract:
Criminal actors are widely assumed to maintain a low profile, exerting power through coercion and clandestine networks. Scholarship addressing public action by criminal actors focuses largely on visible violence. However, an ample empirical record demonstrates that criminal actors also communicate publicly to broad audiences. To better understand this practice, my study focuses on campaigns of narco-messaging in Mexico. I ask: how do criminal actors represent themselves when they speak publicly? How does such self-portrayal interact with other practices of criminal governance and control? I identify three patterns of self-representation: Ruler of territory, Scourge of enemies, and Guardian of people. Overall, public communication expands the repertoires of criminal actors, offering ways to modify public perceptions of better-known practices such as costly signaling through violence. Different representations are deployed strategically in the contexts of establishing regimes of governance, maintaining regimes, and fighting criminal wars.
Philip Luke Johnson 