Conference: Governing the Unruly

Governing the Unruly:

Scholars and practitioners debated security and criminality in the Americas

On 3-4 June, LAC members Carlos Pérez Ricart and Carlos Solar, hosted an international academic conference on security and criminality in the Americas. This successful event brought together over 50 young and established academics, civil society members, and policymakers from Europe, the United States, and Latin America to discuss. Participants discussed topical issues including the militarisation of security, the wave of criminal violence in Central America and the state of policing and public security policies, looking at case studies from Chile to Mexico. Scholars came from prestigious universities including Chicago, Berkeley, KCL, Illinois, Purdue, PUC Rio, GIGA, York, ITAM, Georgia State, and CUNY, among many others. The conference was an opportunity to strengthen links between the LAC staff and the Foreign Office, the London-based think-tank International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the consultancy firm, Oxford Analytica. Among the scholars leading the debate were David Mares (UC San Diego), Monica Serrano (Colegio de Mexico), Wil Pansters (Utrecht University), Annette Idler, Alan Knight, and Andreza de Souza Santos (Oxford), Jose Miguel Cruz (Florida International University), Antonio Sampaio (IISS), Ben Smith (Warwick), and Spencer Chainey (UCL). The event also drew insight from local perspectives, as participants included Salvador Caro, former chief of police in Guadalajara, Miguel La Rota previously at the office of the general prosecutor in Colombia, and Robert Malengrau from UMRio. Young scholars from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Trinidad and Tobago received small travel awards thanks to contributions from the Malcom Deas Fund and the Foreign Office.

The two-day event included over a dozen panels with scholars and policymakers

Shane Prince from the University of West Indies at Saint Augustine and conference organisers Carlos Perez Ricart and Carlos Solar

From the left: Vanja Grujic from University of Brasilia, Markus Hochmüller from Free University Berlin and a visiting fellow at the LAC, Desiree Reder from GIGA- Hamburg, and Nat Morris, UCL