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SIS Professor Anthony Fontes has won a Wenner-Gren research grant in support of his research on state-criminal collusion in Guatemala and its effect on Central American asylum seekers.

The Wenner-Gren foundation helps anthropologists advance anthropological knowledge, combat inequality, and help communities flourish, and Fontes’ project was chosen as one that will make a significant contribution to anthropological conversations through collaboration and engagement.

Through multi-sited ethnography with Central American migrants along migration paths and in their communities in the United States and Guatemala, Fontes will explore the struggle for survival and sanctuary when the state is criminal—or appears as such—and criminals copycat the state. By gathering into a single frame the mechanisms through which (il)licit power networks in Central America and the United States conjoin to discipline displaced subjects, he hopes to set a new agenda for identifying and deconstructing the consequences of this transnational criminal governance assemblage for asylum-seekers, the US asylum system, and US and Guatemalan societies.

Fontes is a geographer and ethnographer who writes and teaches about violence, migration and forced displacement, transnational illicit economies, mass incarceration, and the politics of security in the Americas. His first book, Mortal Doubt: Transnational Gangs and Social Order in Guatemala City (UC Press 2018), winner of the William LeoGrande Award, explores cycles of violence and migration in the making of extreme peacetime insecurity in Central America’s Northern Triangle. His ethnographic fieldwork trespasses the blurred boundaries between the underworld, the state and law-abiding society, scaling between the intimate and the global to illuminate how transnational forces impact the personal and the everyday.