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Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Dissertation on police - gang cooperation in Korea

There's an interesting article at the Joongang Daily about Jonson Porteux, who as a doctoral student gained the trust of prosecutors and police as well as gang leaders while researching "the symbiotic relationship between the state and mafia-type groups, and why those within developed democracies tolerate, and sometimes even cooperate with, criminal organizations."
He conducted field work on the subject in Korea between 2010 and 2011 while on a Fulbright scholarship, and completed his doctoral dissertation, “Police, Paramilitaries, Nationalists, and Gangsters: The Processes of State Building in Korea,” last year.
The dissertation can be found here. The section I've read so far looks at how the Korean government privatized the redevelopment process in the 1980s, following the development of Mok-dong, and examines how gangs are subcontracted to evict recalcitrant tenants, looking specifically the Yongsan incident in 2009 and the evicting of vendors in Insadong in 2011. Both the article and the dissertation make for interesting reading,




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