A Combination of Extortion and Civic Duty: A Comparative Criminological Perspective on Informal Security Organisations in Bali

Abstract

Gang Studies is an emerging field in criminology. Most scholarship on gang-like groups focus on the local and the particular. The complex and nuanced nature of gangs does demand this approach, but there are also strong patterns of structure, function, origin and behaviour in gangs which seem to hold despite otherwise large differences in ethnicity, language and culture. In this chapter, I attempt to sketch a universal model of gangs—the circumstances in which they will arise, and the forms that they will take—and test that model against the reality of informal security groups in post-Suharto Bali.