Winner of the 2025 QoG Best Paper Award
We are happy to announce that the 2025 Quality of Government Best Paper Award goes to David Cerero Guerra, Ph.D. Candidate at Yale University, for his paper: When Criminals Help the State: Winning Hearts and Minds through Facilitation of State Service Provision
The motivation from the Award Committee reads as follows:
This paper makes an original and important contribution to the study of state–criminal relations and the broader hearts and minds literature. Challenging conventional assumptions that criminal organizations either undermine or replace the state in service provision, it introduces the concept of strategic facilitation: criminal groups may actively support state service provision to advance their own interests. This argument opens a new perspective on governance in contexts of overlapping authority.
The paper’s key theoretical contribution is to show how facilitation generates soft power. By selectively enabling state services, gangs shape the implementation of enforcement in ways that undermine its impartiality. Rather than relying solely on coercion, they influence residents and state actors, producing uneven cooperation and biased accountability. This reconceptualization deepens our understanding of how non-state actors subtly reshape state authority.
The empirical contribution is equally impressive. Drawing on qualitative interviews and shadowing observations with gang members combined with original panel survey data from gang-governed neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia, the author both develops and tests the theory with a mixed methods approach. The findings are striking: despite a citywide increase in firearm seizures, neighbourhoods with gang-facilitated services experienced a decline in firearm enforcement and lower reporting of gang-related violence, regardless of crime rates. These findings have important implications for how and why criminal organizations cooperate with state institutions as well as how these criminal networks foster compliance and support from everyday civilians living in their territories.
Through theoretical innovation, methodological rigor, and exceptional fieldwork, this paper substantially advances scholarship on governance, accountability, and contested state authority. We thus conclude that it is a highly deserving recipient of the QoG Best Paper Award.
The award Committee,
Andreas Bågenholm, Associate Professor
Emilia Elia, Post doc
Frederik Pfeiffer, PhD candidate
Nicholas Charron, Professor