Self-Regenerating Crime: The Resilient Network of a Sector of Rio de Janeiro’s Drug Trafficking in the 1970s

Abstract

This paper provides a social network analysis (SNA) of Rio de Janeiro’s drug trafficking in the early 1970s. After presenting an overview of organized crime theory and the place of SNA in it, I show how the network was constructed. The remaining parts explores the social embeddedness of the network, its topology, and how it behaves in response to attack strategies. The findings show that the network organized itself through a modular topology with small-world effects and a small to moderate social embeddedness, which is potentially resilient to attack strategies. In conclusion, I outline some of the implications for sociological theory.