Zora Hauser recently received the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with the Institute of Criminology to pursue her research on the subject of peace and war in organised crime. The Leverhulme Trust provides Early Career Fellowships to support exceptional researchers in gaining a long-term career in academia.
Hauser became interested in a career in academia after working across several countries as a researcher in the private sector, the not-for-profit sector, and government. She describes research as “my natural habitat” and became interested in Cambridge due to the “interesting mix of people”.
“At the Institute of Criminology, you have academics coming from very different backgrounds, with different trajectories in what they study. There's not many that do what I do,” she explains. “But I see this as an opportunity. I can, for example, have an exchange with a philosopher here. This is rare in my field. There are people studying networks, people studying prisons. And this is all very interesting for me. They can help me tease out different aspects of my research.”
Her Leverhulme project, ‘Mafia Diplomacy: The External Relations of Organised Crime’, began in January 2025. Hauser will investigate how organised crime groups establish and maintain relationships among themselves and with their counterparts in the legal world. She summarises it as studying how these groups conduct war and make peace.
“War is one of the most extensively studied and historically significant subjects of research across disciplines,” she explains. “I want to understand how peace and war function within the world of organised crime”.
Hauser is particularly interested in comparing organised crime dynamics within countries that constitute the ‘Global North’, and those in the ‘Global South’. While the high levels of violence across Latin America have attracted many researchers, there is comparatively less known about the situation on the other side of the Atlantic. Gang conflicts there have also driven spikes in violence, albeit with different patterns and intensity.
Among the organised crime groups studied by Hauser are contemporary cases, such as London gang wars and the current Colombian conflict, as well as historical cases, involving, for instance, Italian mafia wars throughout the 20th Century. She argues that organised crime can be better understood if not considered as a radically different social phenomenon:
“We are speaking of groups and individuals that live in our society, follow norms as we all do, and run a business – just of a different kind. What is different is that they do so outside the scope of the law. In simple terms, it means that they cannot go to the police if robbed or to court if a contract is not respected” explains Hauser. According to Hauser: “Violence does play a play a role, but not as significant as we might think. There are many other ways in which these people and groups negotiate among themselves and solve conflicts.”
‘Mafia Diplomacy’ aims to provide an insight into precisely this: the norms, codes, and practices that explain war and peace within the context of organised crime, whether between groups or in relation to the state. The project will result in a monograph and a series of research articles which Hauser hopes will inform policy makers.
“Today countries all across the globe struggle to find a workable strategy to counter organised crime, with billions invested in both repression and prevention programmes that seem to have yielded poor results” says Hauser.
New approaches appear necessary, and Hauser explores two in her project: “We might want to understand under which conditions we could negotiate with organised crime to achieve peace, and how we would do it. We also might understand under which conditions private mediation between criminal groups should be encouraged. I am well aware that even formulating these hypotheses pushes the limits of morality for some. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do. I'm saying let's start asking the question.”