Rebecca Hanson

Assistant Professor University of Florida

  • Gainesville FL

Rebecca Hanson conducts research on participatory democratic neighborhood experiments and police militarization.

Contact

University of Florida

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Biography

Rebecca Hanson is an assistant professor for the Center for Latin American Studies. She has conducted research on participatory democratic neighborhood experiments, socialist ideology in Venezuela, civilian police reform, police militarization and its impacts on organized crime, and the effects of police-community meetings on citizen attitudes and police behavior. Rebecca's other area of research analyzes sexual harassment and ethnographic fieldwork.

Areas of Expertise

Sexual Harassment
Gangs
Crime
Venezuelan Politics
Socialism
Political Theory
Latin American Studies
Citizen Security and Policing
Poverty and Inequality
Venezuelan Economy
Policing
Violence
Politics

Media Appearances

This Is Not the Right Way to Curb Immigration

The New York Times  print

2025-04-04

The Trump administration last month deported scores of Venezuelan men to El Salvador, sending them to a maximum-security prison for gang members. The administration claimed that most of the men were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, a group that, according to the executive order decreeing the deportations, is “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”

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The murder rate in Venezuela has fallen — but both Trump and Maduro are wrong about why

The Conversation  online

2025-02-24

The case of Venezuela is not one of government control over criminal groups. Rather, it is characterized by an unstable and volatile relationship between the government and multiple competing armed actors, including gangs and the police.

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Bouncy Castles and Grenades: Gangs Erode Maduro’s Grip on Caracas

The New York Times  online

2021-05-30

“Maduro is often seen as a traditional strongman controlling every aspect of Venezuelans’ lives,” said Rebecca Hanson, a sociologist at the University of Florida who studies violence in Venezuela. “In reality, the state has become very fragmented, very chaotic and in many areas very weak.”

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Social

Articles

Preaching to the Choir: A Problem of Participatory Interventions

The Journal of Politics

Hanson, et al.

2025-03-07

Scholars and policymakers alike have endorsed dialogue as a remedy for the global crisis in police–community relations. But the community members who choose to engage in dialogue with police officers, we find, are those who trust the police to begin with.

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Shoutings, Scoldings, Gossip, and Whispers: Mothers’ Responses to Armed Actors and Militarization in Two Caracas Barrios

Latin American Research Review

Zubillaga & Hanson

2023-12-11

We compare the experiences of women in two poor and working-class neighborhoods in Caracas. Through this comparative ethnographic project, we aim to show how, in the midst of state-sponsored depredation and with an overwhelming presence of guns in their lives, women use their cultural roles as mothers to perform everyday forms of resistance vis-à-vis the different armed actors that impose their presence in the barrios.

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From carceral punitivism to systematic killing: The necropolitics of policing in post-Chávez Venezuela

Violence: An International Journal

Rebecca Hanson, Veronica Zubillaga

2021-05-12

Since 2017, state security forces in Venezuela have been responsible for over 20% of violent deaths in the country. This represents an unprecedented period of state repression in the country’s history that demands examination. In this article, we argue that in order to understand the recent increase in violent deaths in Venezuela during the post-Chávez period, we must place at the center of our analysis the discourses and practices of an extremely privileged actor, the state, in the context of the collapse of oil prices.

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