Study title

By combining techniques such as structured interviews and direct observation in meetings and other events, the team sought to understand and compare activists’ diverse initiatives. This project studied activist responses to crime-related violence and corruption in the Mexican state of Michoacán. We understood activism as practices aimed at changing “the rules of the game” to achieve a more just society. In such difficult contexts as the Mexican state of Michoacán, activists are themselves often subject to violence, and hindered by corruption and other institutional failings. Despite this, we found that some of the many initiatives that we studied did help to mitigate the effects of violence and corruption, and to change some of the rules of the game that made them possible. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted between 2017 and 2019 to elucidate regional differences as well as different kinds of activism. The project had the objective of evaluating the effectiveness of the different activist groups. Our comparative ethnographic approach enabled us to generate insights that were at once sensitive to local specifics and applicable to other parts of the world affected by crime, violence, and corruption.Although scholars and analysts suspect that civil society has the potential to mitigate the effects of criminal violence, few have conducted substantial research on the topic, and they have focused mainly on national (and international) civil organizations. We propose to focus on civil organizations based in the affected regions themselves, specifically within the west-central Mexican states of Michoacan and Jalisco, a region with high levels of criminal violence. It is increasingly recognized that treating organized crime as a matter of security is insufficient and can even exacerbate the problem, and that organized crime must be addressed through holistic strategies that include development consistent with human rights, providing opportunities for a dignified...