Gangsters and Other Statesmen

Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World

Danilo Mandić

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691200057
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

How global organized crime shapes the politics of borders in modern conflicts Separatism has been on the rise across the world since the end of the Cold War, dividing countries through political strife, ethnic conflict, and civil war, and redrawing the political map. Gangsters and Other Statesmen examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making.Danilo Mandi? conducted fieldwork in the disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, talking to mobsters, separatists, and policymakers in war zones and along major smuggling routes. In this timely and provocative book, he demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Blending extensive archival sleuthing and original ethnographic data with insights from sociology and other disciplines, Mandi? argues that organized crime can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict.Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, Gangsters and Other Statesmen raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.

PART I

Separatism, Meet Mafia

1

Introduction

The day he believes that separatism pays, on that day he will certainly become a separatist.

—ROLAND GIRARD, FRANCO-AMERICANS OF NEW ENGLAND

That people fighting for their independence will take aid from wherever they can find it is clear. To win our independence we should even take aid, as they say, from the devil himself.

—AGOSTINHO NETO, THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN

Separatism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries poses a paradox. On the one hand, the world is ostensibly coming together through globalization. On the other, the territorial integrity of nations appears fragile in most regions. How are these two trends related? This book argues that countries torn by separatist movements since the Cold War cannot be adequately understood without an appreciation of organized crime. Far from passive by-products or trivial catalysts, mafias can play a decisive, autonomous role in shaping state-separatist relations, promoting or hindering secession, and fueling war. Transnational processes—of mafia expansion, chronic smuggling, and patrimonial governance—critically shape national processes of ethnic mobilization, border reconfiguration, and state collapse. Through a comparative historical analysis of the role of organized crime in West Africa, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, I examine understudied dynamics of territorial consolidation in torn states. By nourishing, infiltrating, and even co-opting governments and separatist movements, mafias have the power to mold the basic political units of our world.

Separatist movements are a hallmark of globalization. Since 1990, new nation-states have emerged at an average rate of one per year. By a conservative estimate, over three hundred separatist movements likewise aspire to statehood.¹ Some—such as Scots in the United Kingdom, the Flemish in Belgium, or Québécois in Canada—are moderate and unsuccessful. Others—like Crimea, Kurdistan, or South Sudan—revived questions about how separatism develops and what can be done to accommodate it peacefully. Seemingly never-ending territorial consolidation in torn states appears to dispel the hope and promise of globalization. These disintegrative domestic processes, it would appear, are impeding integrative global ones.

This book suggests not. I propose that transnational organized crime significantly shapes the politics of borders in torn states. While economic, historical, geopolitical, religious, and demographic factors explaining separatism have been widely explored, a distinguishing feature of torn states has been neglected: their deep criminalization. Unlike in consolidated nations, the existence and operation of globalized mafias matter in separatist cases. Counterintuitively, furthermore, organized crime has the capacity to both promote and obstruct separatist movement success by: determining the stability and capacity of weak host states engaged in curbing separatism, with a fateful impact on the trajectories of secession; supplying separatist movements with criminal resources and allies, without which they are doomed to demobilization; generating or prolonging separatist confrontation and war; and promoting stalemate and ethnic reconciliation. Given these realities, globalized mafias and separatist politics are deeply symbiotic. In developing a framework for understanding these processes, I will rethink what is typically a tale of two sides—the host state and separatist movement—as instead a story about a triad: states, separatists, and mafias. Then I will develop a typology of organized crime in three regions rife with torn states, grounded in two dimensions: how state dependent and partisan mafias are.

This approach entails demystifying organized crime, as we disown—perhaps reluctantly—many cherished folk sociological beliefs about lawbreaking, impropriety, and deviance. Mafia mythology carries a twofold danger: romanticization and demonization. On the one hand, organized crime is glorified as Robin Hoodism.² Since precapitalist societies, social banditry has been a potent form of primitive resistance: a religion of the oppressed. From Jesse James to Al Capone, the gangster served as a symbol of revolutionary change that is otherwise impossible: “a surrogate for the failure of the mass to lift itself out of its own poverty, helplessness and meekness.”³ For pragmatic and symbolic reasons, gangsters cultivate an aura of purity, righteousness, and invincibility. Public opinion—or is it public madness?—often ranks criminals higher than elected officials.

On the other hand, no slur is complete without invocations of mafia villainy. Knee-jerk labeling of “gangster” regimes, firms, and movements settles policy disputes before they begin. Politicians paint criminals black. Law enforcement (the leading data collectors on the subject) exaggerate mafias’ sinister influence, and omit continuities between state and criminal sectors. Regarding torn states, scholars dispute caricatures of separatist statelets as “criminalized badlands,” cautioning that “this image was overplayed” in many quarters.⁴ Indeed, gangsters play a special role in modern demonology for good reason. The histories of countless nation-states are replete with mafias as forces to be reckoned with—serious contenders for not only economic monopoly but for political legitimacy itself. The Japanese Yakuza, Russian organized crime, and four Italian syndicates were pivotal in nationalist development.⁵ Today, global organized crime raises between $800 billion and $1.6 trillion yearly, or 2 percent of the world economy.⁶ Yet existing approaches treat mafias as apolitical nuisances, neglect to conceptualize organized crime as an autonomous actor, and fail to differentiate between mafias associated with host state territory and institutions, and those associated with separatist territory and institutions. Overcoming these limitations, we open new horizons for understanding torn states.

A related task is to recognize the singular opportunity structure in which separatist movements find themselves. Contemporary nationalism has transformed radically, both as ideology and practice.⁷ What used to be a unificationist force seeking to transcend petty tribal and ethnic cleavages—the Italian Risorgimento or the Pan-Slavic movement—evolved into a disintegrative force proliferating tiny, unsustainable ministates. “For [separatist] elites,” if not necessarily their constituents, “small is indeed beautiful; it provides them with the prerogatives, the prerequisites, and the trappings of power.”⁸ In Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) classic formulation, most movements seek “voice” and “loyalty.” Separatist movements are interested strictly in “exit.” But the recursive trap of separatist logic has yet to be surmounted.⁹ Secession within a region within an autonomy within a province is all too common, and reminiscent of the parodied Harvardian stranded on a desert island: he launches three political parties and ten newspapers, all violently disagreeing.

In such separatist contexts, mafias have unique choices. Whereas in normal circumstances gangsters “are very often satisfied with the existing rules of the political and economic game in which they move,” those rules are unstable and opaque in torn states.¹⁰ Mafias can undermine both conflict resolution (which may reimpose clear laws and border control) and conflict escalation (which may further destabilize the existing, lucrative lack of jurisdiction, law, and order). Alternatively, they can co-opt or support the separatist movement, hedging bets on a newly emerging polity where the criminal fiefdom can reign supreme under a novel, sovereign political umbrella. Finally, they can co-opt or support the host state in crushing separatists, hoping for a return to the initial environment with which they are familiar and comfortable. Such an opportunity structure affords mafias exceptional power.

Through comparative-historical analysis this book inquires into how transnational organized crime impacts separatism by examining border disputes in sixteen countries (n = 16) in three regions.¹¹ First, by comparing two cases in depth, I explore the conditions under which organized crime enhances separatist movement success (part 2). Second, by analyzing fourteen cases across three regions, I explain the variety of roles mafias play in torn states (part 3). The investigation is, the reader will notice, fairly exploratory and conducive to provisional explanatory conclusions—not extravagant, definitive causal claims. Nevertheless, through careful comparison of cases, process tracing of separatist trajectories, and synthesis of the best available sources on the role of organized crime in these societies (see “Sources” in the appendix), I unveil understudied and counterintuitive patterns of mafia influence on separatist dynamics. These recurring patterns across cases should, at minimum, give us pause regarding torn states globally. I do not propose a “theory” of separatism, and still less a refutation of extant approaches that disregard organized crime entirely. Rather, the reader is invited to a shift in emphasis in their comprehension of border disputes in torn states and offered a set of tools for explaining separatist outcomes. No oddity, the convergence of torn states and mafias is—I argue—perfectly normal.

The first half of the analysis compares two paired cases of separatism (n = 2) in Serbia/Kosovo and Georgia / South Ossetia, and the second investigates fourteen cases (n = 14) across three regions ...