Social Criticism & Political Thought

ABSTRACT: Policymakers agree that rising levels of criminal violence in the Global South threaten to destroy liberal systems of governance that ensure human security, free markets, and the rule of law. This viewpoint aligns with prevailing assumptions in social and political thought that reify violence as fundamentally destructive. This paper contests the conventional picture that equates illicit lethal force merely with the destruction of socio-political life. Without disputing the horrors experienced by those victimized it argues that extra-legal violence is a form of labor—a value-creating activity that shapes material and social worlds within gendered modes of cooperation. It does so by building upon the insights of feminist theorists who have conceptualized sex work as work. Drawing from an ethnographic book project centered on the experiences of MS-13 and Barrio 18 gang members, the paper underpins its argument by exploring the alternative orders of belonging and welfare that gang violence produces for socio-economically excluded communities in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. By using Central America as a case study, it illuminates the often-overlooked ways in which violent labor becomes a form of affirming one’s existence within the gendered and racialized underworlds of the Global South. It also prompts us to envision alternative approaches where the fight against violence challenges the exploitative hierarchies of labor.