Gang Lives: Global Portraits from the Streets and Beyond

Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member. Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world.Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others. At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular global scapegoats.Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo partic