BOOK REVIEW: A WORLD OF GANGS - Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture

up-to-date, comprehensive study of gangs as a worldwide phenomenon

A WORLD OF GANGS - Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture by John M. Hagedorn; Foreword by Mike Davis. U. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN; www.upress.umn.edu; presspr@umn.edu/ 198+xxxii pages. $24.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8166-5066-8. notes index.

"Hagedorn argues that the global gang is part of the continuum of crime and revolt that defines the new horizon of geopolitics in the twenty-first century," writes Davis in his Foreword. Multifarious gangs have formed in the environment of globalization to "mirror the inhuman ambitions and greed of society's trendsetters and deities." In this view, gangs are the underside of the era's unchecked, ungoverned free-market economics Davis calls "savage capitalism" and social trends creating a gulf between the better-offs and the have-nots.

The work is about the worldwide phenomenon of "gangs compris[ing] flexible forms of armed groups, some changing from gang to militia to criminal syndicate to political party, or some existing as all types of simultaneously." One hears about such groups--which often are not termed gangs--daily in the media. Absorbing Hagedorn's view--enlightening in many ways--one sees that gangs in one form or another and by one name or another are responsible for most of the headline news, particularly on international affairs. Among the multifarious types of gangs Hagedorn treats are ones involved in politics in some American cities such as Chicago and New York either from strategies of respective mayors or designs or alliances of particular gangs themselves. The author expands on this to denote how different social or political policies can actually strengthen gangs or create conditions for the growth of new ones.

Gangs are a social reality that is virtually impossible to root out. Not only are they a means to gain and exercise power, but they provide a ground for identity which is especially appealing to masses of persons not only in developed countries but in poor ones in this era of failed states, tribalism, and desire for material goods fueled by the success of the Western democracies and global marketing of consumer goods. Nonetheless, Hagedorn is not despairing of dealing with gang violence, drug trafficking, and other socially injurious aspects of gangs. Isolating the selflessness and solidarity of gang members, he sees gangs as basically manifesting as desire for a meaningful life in desperate, practically completely hopeless circumstances. In Hagedorn's view, gangs are also means of resistance against the depredations being committed against the ethnic, social, regional, etc., groups which their members come from. The author sees the ambivalences of the music, celebrities, vitality, and status of hip-hop culture in particular as the prime indication of the ambivalences, but also the promise of the characteristics of gangs.

This is an eye-opening account of a major international phenomena which will give one a new conception of gangs; as when Hagedorn refers to certain groups as "voting gangs" and describes their activities in getting and maintaining political power. Not only do the author's accounts of gangs from around the world, the conditions out of which they emerge, and their activities conduce to a new perspective, but he also puts forth new principles for an intellectual comprehension of gangs. Hagedorn puts aside the conventional sociological, structural, comprehension of gangs as alternatives, or outsiders, to ordinary society, and the related criminal-justice analysis of gangs seeing them as a crime problem to be resolved in favor of a "cultural" point of view seeking to comprehend gangs as phenomena of particular social conditions and as aberrant, in many cases wretched, manifestations of common social qualities, purposes, and aims.