Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy and Political Collapse

191 Pages·2015·2.187 MB·English

by  Katherine Hirschfeld (auth.)

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Gangster States
Organized Crime, Kleptocracy
and Political Collapse
Katherine Hirschfeld
Associate Professor, University of Oklahoma, USA
© Katherine Hirschfeld 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-49028-5
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix
Preface x
Acknowledgments xiii
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Secret Vices 1
1.2 What Is Organized Crime? 3
1.3 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 7
1.4 Abbreviated Case Study: Post-Soviet Russia 10
1.5 Gangs as Primitive States 12
1.6 Collapse and Regeneration 17
1.7 Darwinian Political Economy 19
2 What Is Organized Crime? 23
2.1 Formal versus Informal Economies 24
2.2 Organized Crime as Racketeering 26
2.3 Descriptive Vignette: Camorra 27
2.4 The Organization of Crime 28
2.5 Racketeering in Prison Economies 29
2.6 The Organization of a Stateless Campus Economy 30
2.7 Labor Rackets 31
2.8 Gambling Rackets 33
2.9 Prohibition 35
3 Failing Economics 38
3.1 Contaminated Markets 38
3.2 The Cold War in Economic Thinking 39
3.3 The Road to Friedmanistan 44
3.4 Experimental Vignette: The Other Invisible Hand 46
4 The Evolution of Racketeering 49
4.1 Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Ecology 49
4.2 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 51
4.3 Cheating and Systemic Complexity 54
4.4 Racketeering as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy 57
4.5 ESS Thinking: Farming and Raiding 57
4.6 From Raiding to Protection Rackets 61
viii Contents
4.7 Supply and Demand 62
4.8 The Geography of Protection 65
4.9 Narrative Vignette: Raiding and Trading on the Steppes 65
5 Organized Crime and Kleptocracy 68
5.1 From Gangs to Primitive States 68
5.2 The Underworld as Prehistory 69
5.3 Territoriality, Leadership, Violence 69
5.4 Prehistoric Gangster-States 73
5.5 Early European Gangster-States 75
5.6 Mafia Branding: The Exquisite Corpse 76
5.7 Narrative Vignette: Under the Cartels 77
5.8 The Gangsterization of Democracy 80
5.9 Scenes from a Kleptocracy 83
5.10 Cuba Case Study 84
5.11 Comparative Vignettes 92
5.12 Hispañola 93
5.13 Haiti 95
5.14 Zaire 98
5.15 Post-Soviet Gangster-States 99
5.16 Narrative Vignette: After the USSR 99
5.17 Postscript: American Exceptionalism? 101
6 Things Fall Apart . . . and Rebuild 104
6.1 Collapse as Conundrum 104
6.2 Progress and Underdevelopment 106
6.3 The State as Exaptation 109
6.4 Secondary State Formation in Prehistory 111
6.5 Collapse and Regeneration 112
6.6 Gray Zones and Demapping 113
6.7 Yugoslavia/Bosnia 117
6.8 Moldova and Transnistria 120
7 Darwinian Political Economy 122
7.1 Research Redux 122
7.2 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 123
7.3 Darwinian Political Economy 126
Notes 129
References 151
Index 171
List of Figures and Tables
Tables
1.1 Partial List of Anecdotal Terminology Used by Different
Researchers to Describe the Fusion of Organized Crime
and State Power 16
4.1 Original Payoff Matrix for Hawks and Doves Game
(taken from Smith, 1982:12) 52
Figures
3.1 Visual Representation of Utopian Thinking in
20th Century Political Economy 43
4.1 Supply/Demand Curve with Hypothetical Mafia
Threshold Triggered When Demand Is Very High and
Supply Is Low 64
6.1 Spencerian Misrepresentation of Human Evolution
Implying Directionality and Progress 105
ix