CONTESTED TERRITORY: VIOLENCE, ORGANISED CRIME AND TERRITORIAL PRACTICES IN CONTEMPORARY HONDURAS

The relationship between organised crime and territory is a complex one, and one which affects extensively security dynamics. Especially in countries plagued by violence and insecurity, like Honduras, territory is strategically important for criminal actors, that usually seek to obtain territorial control in certain areas and often compete over it with their rivals and authorities. Despite this, Honduras remains a highly understudied country in academic and policy discourses on the issue, especially due to the objectively dangerous nature of the criminal groups present in the country and the elevated levels of corruption and impunity that permeate it. As a result, the ways in which criminal groups shape the country’s territory, affecting local communities and security dynamics, remains an underexplored aspect in the literature. Especially, little is known about the way in which criminal groups’ presence, activities, and interactions shape space and territory across different scales in Honduras. By drawing upon thirty semi-structured interviews with Honduran residents, ex-residents, and experts on criminal groups, activities, and dynamics in the country, and the analysis of official judicial documents, secondary literature, available public reports, and media outlets, this qualitative case study explores the ways in which criminal, state, and non-state actors shape the territory in Honduras in the context of a liberal market democracy. By focusing on different scales, respectively the local, regional, and national, and the interplay among these, this study aims at painting a picture of the bordering and territorial practices that different actors – especially criminal groups – have been carrying out in the country approximately in the last three decades. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this thesis consolidates and integrates the literature on organised crime, violence, the state-crime nexus, territory and territorial practices, and borders and bordering practices with original empirical research. By focusing on gangs in urban areas of the country, drug trafficking organisations in rural ones, and state-crime relationships across the national territory, I argue that these actors have been able to actively produce and shape the country’s territory along micro, meso, and national lines, often establishing authority on it, and have contributed to shaping the Honduran territory as a deeply contested space. In doing so, I argue, these groups mirror – and, at the same time, are embedded into – the dynamics of capital accumulation and resource commodification entrenched in the country’s history of capitalist and neo-colonial exploitation and occupation throughout the centuries.