Through biographical investigations of gang members' life histories, this open access book illustrates the range of causes, motivations, and consequences associated with being a gang member.

Gangs are one of a small number of truly global social phenomena, present across time and space all over the world. Partly as a result of this ubiquity, gangs are inherently revealing social institutions, and can be connected to a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, socialization, identity formation, territorialization, or the articulation of gender relations, amongst others.

At the same time, however, gangs are also frequently associated with an almost pathological form of violence, generally represented as engaging in senseless forms of brutality, and gangsters are popular global scapegoats. Such representations make it all the more urgent to understand what it is that truly motivates individuals to become gang members, why they undergo particular trajectories, and what the long-term consequences of gang membership might be.

Through a comparison of thirteen life histories of gang members from twelve different countries around the world, this book offers a nuanced and sensitive overview of the global gang experience. Life histories are ideal lenses through which to explore these issues due to their ability to simultaneously reflect both the uniqueness and the embedded complexity of gang lives, but also their capacity to offer fundamentally relatable portraits that elicit empathy and humanize individuals.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council grant (no. 787935).