For the past five years, the GANGS project, a European Research Council-funded project led by Dennis Rodgers, has been studying global gang dynamics in a comparative perspective. When understood in a nuanced manner that goes beyond the usual stereotypes and Manichean representations, gangs and gangsters arguably constitute fundamental lenses through which to think about and understand the world we live in.
Kieran Mitton tells us about the life of Gaz, a former Sierra Leonean gang member who became a poet and then a farmer. His remarkable trajectory shows gangsters are by no means doomed to live in the shadow of their former lives and that opportunities to leave can present themselves in all sorts of ways at different moments in time.
