A World of Gangs - Final Conference of the ERC GANGS Project

The closing event of the ERC-funded GANGS project was held at CERI of Sciences Po Paris from June 19-21, 2024. GANGS, a research initiative supported by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 program, was coordinated by Professor Dennis Rodgers from the Geneva Graduate Institute from 2019 to 2024. The project brought together a global team of researchers to explore the dynamics of gangs, gangsters, and ganglands through a comparative approach.

This bilingual conference (English/French) provided an opportunity to present and discuss the various research avenues developed during the project. The event included a series of presentations, roundtable discussions, and research findings covering different geographic regions such as DRC, Nicaragua, South Africa, Algeciras, Naples, and Marseille. The discussions were enriched by contributions from esteemed academics, who provided critical insights into the project's outcomes. 

The conference concluded with a roundtable on global gang lives and a final discussion on the broader implications of the research to which Professor Perazzone discussed the context of the DRC. She highlighted that the ambivalence in how the police treat civilians in Congo should not be seen as a mix of brutality and kindness or indifference and assistance. Instead, it is this very ambivalence in controlling territory and interacting with individuals that makes the police particularly violent.