Criminality, political power and conflict

Critical perspectives

José Antonio Gutiérrez Danton, Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9781526181831
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526181824
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

The departure point of this book is the understanding of politics and criminality as two historically differentiated domains of human activity that are different but interrelated, and often co-constitutive and overlapping. In everyday political and domestic life, distinguishing between what is political and what is criminal is achieved through different processes and at different territorial levels. These liminal and overlapping areas between the political and the criminal are highly contested spaces. This book argues against ahistorically drawing a separating line between political armed mobilisation and economic crimi­nality. Each chapter shows that not only insurgents, separatists and other political rebels but also the State and elites can, and generally must (because war waging is not cheap), engage in differ­ent forms of economic criminality as a result of their political status. In no longer separating criminality and politics, this book is able to offer new concepts with which to analyse civil war, political power and criminality.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Criminality, political power and conflict – critical perspectives
• 1 Beyond Elias and Tilly: historical sociology, crime and organised violence
• 2 The politics of criminality: the state, opium and armed groups in Burma
• 3 ‘I have created an idealism’: explaining public political discourses of the PCC and other organised criminal groups in Latin America
• 4 Inside the Israel Complex: the rise of Narco-Pentecostalism in Rio de Janeiro
• 5 Pro-state armed groups in Northern Ireland: rethinking the position of ‘loyalist’ armed groups in Northern Ireland
• 6 Killing criminals: lethal targeting by the paramilitaries in the Colombian civil war
• 7 Greedy peace-makers: post-FARC-EP trajectories from political crime to politicised common crime
• 8 Resisting and existing with criminalisation: the case of Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold producers
• 9 The necropolitics of criminalisation in the Colombian War on Drugs
• 10 Amalgamation of special forces and organised crime in Serbia: curbing the democratic transition after the downfall of Slobodan Milošević
• 11 A heavy hand and a weak arm: security strategies, political confrontation and state scarcity in Venezuela
• 12 From minería comunitaria to illegal mining: Indigenous territories and mining formalisation in Peruvian Amazonia
• 13 Bandits, poetry and cartooning: a playful visual anthropology
• Concluding remarks – The problem of Orestes: political violence, criminality and the legitimacy of the state
• Index