Juan C. Campos

Welcome to my academic website. I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley and a Predoctoral Visiting Fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. I am also a Research Associate at the Center on the Politics of Development at UC Berkeley.

As a comparative political scientist, I study how the rise of organized criminal groups (OCGs) reshapes the strategic environment for subnational governments, criminal organizations, and civilian populations in contexts where the state's monopoly on violence is contested. Despite decades of democratization, OCGs in Latin America have emerged as formidable local actors capable of undermining coercive institutions, corrupting security policy, and reshaping democratic competition — yet governments rarely respond as conventional wisdom predicts. My research examines three dimensions of this puzzle: how politicians exploit security reforms to facilitate rather than disrupt criminal operations, how criminal organizations adapt to state pressure in ways existing theory has not anticipated, and how criminal violence erodes democratic representation from within electoral institutions.

My dissertation, Repression, Protection, and Criminal Markets: Essays on Organized Crime and the State in Latin America, addresses these questions across three papers. I combine natural experiments and original fieldwork to produce causal research grounded in specific institutional contexts. I also have related work on how states build institutional capacity to address violence against women in contexts where criminal governance is prevalent.

I hold M.A. degrees in political science from UC Berkeley and California State University, Long Beach, and a B.A. in Government & International Politics from George Mason University.

My CV can be found here.

I can be reached at juan_campos@berkeley.edu