Full Description
In the aftermath of the greed vs. grievance debate and the new wars paradigm, the focus of conflict studies shifted decisively to understanding "predatory" behaviours as the raison d'etre of contemporary conflict. Conflict was viewed as a continuum in which the more you engage in criminal behaviour, the less political you are.This approach has been robustly criticised over the past 15 years; however, in the process, we have been left with unsuitable concepts to handle the complex interactions between civil war, political power and criminality. The departure point here is the understanding of politics and criminality as two historically differentiated domains of human activity. Different, but interrelated, often co-constitutive and overlapping. Here, we empirically and theoretically explore their interactions, connections, and convergences, not focusing solely on irregular actors, thus bringing back the State and elites into this debate.
Contents
Introduction: Criminality, political power, and conflict: Critical perspectives - José A. Gutiérrez and Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín
1 Beyond Elias and Tilly: Historical sociology, crime and organised violence - Siniša Maleševic
2 The politics of criminality: The state, opium, and armed groups in Burma - John Buchanan
3 "I have created an idealism": Explaining public political discourses of the PCC and other organized criminal groups in Latin America - Reynell Badillo Sarmiento
4 Inside the Israel complex: The rise of narco-Pentecostalismin Rio de Janeiro - Kristina Hinz and Doriam Borges
5 Pro-state armed groups in Northern Ireland: Rethinking the position of 'loyalist' armed groups in Northern Ireland - John Doyle
6 Killing criminals: Lethal targeting by the paramilitaries in the Colombian civil war - Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín
7 Greedy peacemakers: Post-FARC-EP trajectories from political crime to politicised common crime - José A. Gutiérrez
8 Resisting and existing with criminalisation: The case of Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold producers - Christoph Kaufmann
9 The necropolitics of criminalisation in the Colombian War on Drugs - Irene Vélez-Torres and Chiara Chiavaroli
10 Amalgamation of special forces and organized crime in Serbia: Curbing the democratic transition after the downfall of Slobodan Miloševic - Kosta Nikolic, Vladimir Petrovic and Danilo Mandic.
11 A heavy hand and a weak arm: Security strategies, political confrontation and state scarcity in Venezuela - Guillermo Sardi and Fernando Garlin-Politis.
12 From minería comunitaria to illegal mining: Indigenous territories and mining formalization in Peruvian Amazonia - Gisselle Benites
13 Bandits, poetry, and cartooning: A playful visual anthropology - Fernando Garlin-Politis
Concluding remarks - Christian Olsson
