Eldad J. Levy, Ph.D.

Eldad J. Levy is a sociologist whose research examines violence, organized crime, security and urban life, with a regional focus on Latin America and Mexico. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin, where he is affiliated with the Urban Ethnography Lab. His research draws on ethnographic methods and sits at the intersection of economic sociology, criminology, and urban sociology.

His research examines how organized crime, criminal-state collusion, and security entrepreneurship shape markets, governance, and everyday urban life. In Mexico City, he studies the emergence of private security markets and the entrepreneurs who operate within them, exploring how private actors mediate relationships between the state, private capital, and economic elites. He also investigates how the global security industry circulates technologies, expertise, and professional norms that transform governance, reproduce class inequalities, and reconfigure urban space. More broadly, his work examines how relationships between criminal organizations and state actors shape systems of violence, policing, and private governance.

His broader research interests include organized crime, criminal-state relations, policing, private governance, security entrepreneurship, and the sociology of Latin America. His work has been published in leading journals such as Annual Review of Criminology, British Journal of Sociology, and Socio-Economic Review, Work and Occupations among others. His research has been supported by the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) Foundation and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award.