Falko joined Crisis Group in July 2018 as Senior Analyst for Mexico. He is responsible for conducting research on the country’s lethal conflict and the challenges the incoming president faces, particularly as concerns the country’s many regional conflict settings and intra-institutional realities that underpin corruption and collusion by state actors. He provides field-based insights and recommendations, through reports and contributions to media, as to how these should be factored to make for sound security policy.

• Non-state armed groups
• Organised crime
• Criminal governance
• Corruption
• Latin America
• Mexico

Falko has worked on criminal governance, organised crime-state-collusion, and new forms of conflict in Mexico and Latin America since 2010. As a PhD researcher in sociology at the University of Essex (UK), he lived in organised crime-controlled communities in Mexico. He went on to become a freelance researcher and author based in Mexico City, collaborating with Crisis Group, the Ford Foundation, the London School of Economics, and national and international media.

Prior to this, he worked as a research assistant in Germany’s federal parliament in Berlin, and completed a masters degree in Latin American area studies at the University of Passau, Germany.