Please join us for the final speaker in CIPR’s 2026 Spring Speaker Series: Contemporary Challenges to Latin American Democracies.

Eduardo Moncado (Barnard College) will give a talk entitled Citizens, Criminals, and Claim-Making for Public Goods in Latin America.

Millions of people across Latin America live in urban peripheries marked by uneven state presence but where criminal organizations are often present and govern everyday life. What impact does this overlapping reality have on the strategies citizens
use to make claims on the state for public goods?
A comparative analysis across three peripheral Mexico City neighborhoods shows that claim- making strategies vary in both level-individual or collective-and mode-brokered or direct. He argues that criminal governance influences claim-making through two channels: social capital and political brokerage. He uses this argument to structure a comparative analysis of claim-making for a basic but fundamental public good: water. The findings contribute to broader debates on distributive politics,
citizenship, and democracy.