This chapter begins by motivating the puzzles the book seeks to answer. Why do Rio de Janeiro’s drug-trafficking gangs govern neighborhoods? Why do some of these gangs rely on violence and coercion while others resolve disputes, offer welfare, and organize cultural activities for residents? This book argues that gangs govern in these ways because they need the obedience and support of local residents to survive amid shifting relations with rival gangs and the police. This chapter outlines a theory of criminalized governance which revolves around the relations that emerge between gang members and residents within distinct security environments. This theoretical framework builds on three traditions that view criminalized governance akin to processes of state formation, rebel governance, or state perversion. Finally, this chapter outlines its mixed method approach, and describes the methodological and ethical considerations involved in eighteen months of participant observation in three rival gang territories, 206 semi-structured interviews with residents and gang members, and the collection of more than 400 archival documents and a dataset of more than 20,000 anonymous denunciations.

Chapter 7 looks into the interstices of the contemporary sovereign states system. One of the key practical effects of the normative tensions between the different understandings of property informing the practice of the sovereignty cartel is a governance gap between autonomy and multilateralism into which a variety of illicit activities falls. The chapter argues that the tensions not only create spaces in the system in which illicit activity can find a home but actually force some activity there by definition. This often involves non-sovereign actors engaged in economic pursuits, either finding the interstices of sovereignty to arbitrage regulatory gaps or forced into the interstices by those gaps. It also often involves sovereign actors taking advantage of the market value of their sovereign property rights to enrich either their states or themselves. These gaps in governance in the sovereign states system introduce places where sovereign right can be challenged. This is why a sovereignty cartel is necessary to maintain these rights. The cartel is the mechanism by which the sovereign states system polices its interstices and keeps them from undermining the prerogatives of its members.