July 3, 2023No Comments

Latin American street gangs in Europe

Paolo Grassi is an Assistant professor at the University of Milano Bicocca (Department of Human Sciences for Education “R.Massa”).

He has carried out ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Italy in the field of urban anthropology, focusing on the relationship between urban space and violence, gangs, youth cultures, and dynamics of socio-economic marginalization.

He was a research fellow at the Politecnico di Milano (2019-2022) and the University of Padua (2017-2019), visiting fellow at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (2019), the University of Utrecht (2018) and the Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (LAA) de l'École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris La Villette (2017).

He has collaborated with the European projects "TRANSGANG: Transnational gangs as agents of mediation", coordinated by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and "Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography” coordinated by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

He is the author of articles published in national and international journals and four monographs (including “Terreur à Guatemala-ville: Conflits territoriaux, violence et gangs”, L’Harmattan 2018).

Interviewer: Giovanni Giacalone - South America Team

March 8, 2022No Comments

Maria Zuppello on Tropical Jihad in Latin America

Maria Zuppello talks about Jihad in Central and Latin America, with a particular focus on her book “Tropical Jihad. The crime-terror nexus in Latin America”. Maria Zuppello is a freelancer video journalist who has worked with The Guardian, AFP, AP, The Economist, RSI. 

In this session, Maria Zuppello shows the results of her research on tropical jihadism and presents the main arguments of her book “Tropical Jihad. The crime-terror nexus in Latin America”, foreword by Emanuele Ottolenghi. She investigates on the links between jihadist groups and narcotraffickers, as well as on the presence of al-Qaeda and Isis at the Triple Frontier shared by Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. 

Interviewers: Giovanni Giacalone, Marta Pace, Beatrice Tommasi

This is ITSS Verona Member Series Video Podcast by the Central and South America Team.

ITSS Verona - The International Team for the Study of Security Verona is a not-for-profit, apolitical, international cultural association dedicated to the study of international security, ranging from terrorism to climate change, from artificial intelligence to pandemics, from great power competition to energy security.