Eduardo Moncada
Associate Professor Eduardo Moncada is a scholar of the politics of crime and violence in Latin America. His research contributes to the understanding of the political dynamics and consequences of criminal violence. Latin America is among the most violent regions in the world: home to eight percent of the world’s population, but accounting for one-third of the world’s annual homicides. While rooted in the politics of crime and violence, Moncada contributes to broader areas of research in political science, including subnational comparative analysis, urban politics, and Latin American politics. At the same time, his research has an important interdisciplinary component that bridges political science with debates in urban studies and criminology.
In Moncada's first book, Cities, Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America (Stanford University Press, 2016), he analyzed how the relationships between city mayors, business interests, and criminal organizations shape the ways in which major developing world cities respond to the challenge of urban violence. In his second book, Resisting Extortion: Victims, Criminals, and States in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics, 2022), Moncada tackles the following question: Why do victims resist similar forms of criminal victimization in contrasting ways? In this book Moncada uses the widespread but understudied phenomenon of criminal extortion in Latin America to introduce resistance to criminal victimization into the emerging research on the politics of crime.
Resisting Extortion received the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), the Best Publication of 2022 from the Defense, Public Security and Democracy Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Honorable Mention for the 2022 Giovanni Sartori Book Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Honorable Mention for the 2023 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and was the Co-Winner of the 2022 Best Book Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime (IASOC).
Moncada has conducted extensive fieldwork in Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and other parts of Latin America, as well as South Africa.