GUERRA BLANCO, EDGAR EVERARDO

I study violence and organized crime in Mexico — not from a distance, but from within: through ethnographic fieldwork, rigorous social theory, and a decade of public engagement.

My most distinctive theoretical contribution is the application of Niklas Luhmann's General Theory of Social Systems to the study of criminal phenomena — a framework that allows criminal organizations to be understood as differentiated social systems with their own communicative logic, rather than merely as normative deviations or security threats.

My research spans organized crime, self-defense groups, forced disappearances, drug policy, harm reduction, and civil society responses to violence. I combine ethnographic fieldwork with quantitative analysis, working both at the desk and in the territory — including years of fieldwork in Michoacán's Tierra Caliente region, one of Mexico's most violent areas.

I currently coordinate the Permanent Interinstitutional Seminar on Disappearances and Forced Displacement, a space that brings together researchers, search collectives, affected families, and civil society organizations. I also lead a regional research project on violence, territorial control, and peacebuilding in Mexico's Bajío region.
Over the past ten years I have maintained an active presence as a public intellectual, with more than 100 appearances in national and international media — television, radio, and print — including columns and opinion pieces in Animal Político, Nexos, Infobae, La Silla Rota, and El Universal, and a feature in Science on science policy in Mexico.

I am the author, editor, and coordinator of several books, including Los bárbaros de la globalización (Ítaca, 2020) and Hacer frente al horror (CIDE, 2023). My articles have been published in Estudios Sociológicos, Sociológica, Argumentos, and Contemporary Drug Problems (Sage).

Researcher for Mexico, Secihti. National Researcher Level II. PhD in Sociology, University of Bielefeld, Germany.