Normal Bedfellows

Abstract

This chapter discusses three concepts: separatism, organized crime, and the relation between the two. It begins by drawing on social scientific insights to dispel some common misconceptions about, in turn, separatist movements and mafias. By bridging two compartmentalized subfields, one discovers just how natural the connections between them are. Organized crime scholarship typically neglects separatist cases altogether or confounds them with nonseparatist ones. Yet today's globalized mafias have deep structural reasons to flourish, especially in torn states. Organized crime is notoriously embedded in extant community relations: patriarchal, occupational, residential, and above all, ethnic. The chapter then delineates two tools — a Simmelian triadic model of state-separatist-mafia relations, and typology of mafias across three regions — for explaining the phenomenon.