Developing a ‘Global South’ Perspective of Street Children’s Involvement in Organised Crime

The majority of studies about gangs come from the global North meaning that we know very little about young people’s involvement in organized crime in the global South. This chapter explores the roles that Bangladeshi street children play organized crime groups by drawing on interviews with street children, criminal justice practitioners, non-government organization workers and community members, and over three years of participant observation of Bangladesh and its criminal justice system. This paper argues that in order to understand street children’s involvement in Bangladesh’s organized crime groups – the mastaans – it is necessary to expand the boundaries of criminology to include development studies’ concepts of social protection, patron-clientism and child labor. The chapter highlights the need to build a more cohesive collaboration between criminology and development studies

Developing authenticity, building connections; exploring research methodologies in Asia

The article considers the methodological opportunities and challenges associated with three large-scale ethnographic studies conducted in Bangladesh, China and Nepal. It reflects on how locally, and regionally embedded cultural practices and meanings shape Asian criminological research projects. The article argues that conducting research in certain Asian contexts benefits from an awareness and sensitivity to specific modalities of culture in these regions. The following deliberations reflect on the importance of developing authenticity and building connections, embedded within concepts specific and relevant to research in Asia – relationality, guanxi, patronage and adda. The challenges of the research projects, of which there were many, are also discussed, and include dichotomies between research conducted in the global North and global South, coloniality, ethics and issues faced by a British researcher, conducting research in Asia

A ‘Lens of Labor’: Re-Conceptualizing Young People’s Involvement in Organized Crime

Millions of the world’s children engage in labour, often exploitative and essential to their survival. Child labour is closely related to crime; global discourse illustrates how young people are victims of forced and bonded labour and recent studies from the global South demonstrate how young people are hired as the ‘illicit labourers’ of organised crime groups. Despite this, there is a tendency to consider young people, not as labourers but as victims of trafficking or as offenders (often in relation to gangs). To address this lacuna, the article draws on data from 3 studies conducted in the global South to develop a conceptual framework suitable for understanding the intersection between labour and crime. The article develops a metaphorical ‘labour lens’; a lens which centres and prioritises labour and instrumental drivers for crime, embedded within wider structures of illicit markets, established organised crime, state:crime collaboration and the need for children to work to survive. The article integrates economic drivers for involvement in organised crime with the moral economy, within the context of ecological framework of crime, embedded with wider issues of coloniality. In doing so the article develops a new conceptual framework for considering young people’s involvement in organised crime