Rebecca Hanson

Dr. Hanson holds a joint appointment with the Department of Sociology and Criminology and the Center. She has conducted research in Colombia, Honduras, Peru, Venezuela, and the United States. Her most recent book Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power and Venezuela's Security Landscape During Chavismo (Oxford University Press, 2025) draws on ten years of ethnographic, interview, focus group, and survey research to analyze how a first leftist and later authoritarian project produced security outcomes most often associated with neoliberal policies and transitions to democracy. The book sheds light on the security strategies left parties and politicians used to fight crime and protect their political interests; in doing so, their policies supported a dispersal of coercion, a pluralization of armed actors, and the outsourcing and individualization of security.