{"title":"The difference mafias make: a triadic model of organized crime in ethnic conflicts","authors":"D. Mandić","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031114","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT I propose a Simmelian triadic model of the interrelations between (1) host states, (2) separatist movements, and (3) organized crime. It formalizes three generalizable relational configurations: organized crime as (a) tertius gaudens, (b) mediator and (c) divisor et imperator, with operationalizable features defining the nature of each pair of relationships among the three agents. Using the paired case studies of the Serbia-Kosovo and Georgia-South Ossetia ethnic conflicts from 1989–2012, I illustrate the utility of the conceptual model in explaining divergences in separatist success. The model is argued to be superior to conventional and near-universal dyadic conceptualizations – overt or implicit.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"56 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46035199","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Power and crime: a theoretical sketch","authors":"M. Haugaard","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031112","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The article contains a sociological theory of power and crime, demonstrating how crime is socially constructed, relative to power. It is argued that crime is socially constructed differently when power structures are either legitimate or illegitimate, and when power is either coercive or based on authority. Legitimacy has both a sociological and normative meaning, which are not the same. While the emphasis is sociological, the article also contains a normative theorization of crime, relative to political power. The normative aspect hinges on the distinction between dominating power, which is zero-sum, and enabling power, which is positive-sum.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"14 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43180031","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The varieties of paramilitaries paper present to Dublin zoom conference June 10, 2021","authors":"M. Mann","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033098","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033098","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This is a short commentary upon five articles. The main themes of these articles are the roles of paramilitaries in civil wars, focusing specifically on Colombia and the former Yugoslavia. While recommending the quality of the articles, this paper explores two lines of criticism. The first concerns the insufficient attention paid to ideological paramilitaries, who are significant for a number of reasons, including their remarkable resilience in combat. Second, while the papers discuss how paramilitaries fund themselves, the focus is solely upon the commanders. In understanding the paramilitary mobilization it is also important to understand how the rank-in-file support themselves.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"145 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43283522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colombian state reactions to peace: the legacies of the narcoguerrilla-narcoterrorist discourses","authors":"Diana Ximena Machuca Pérez","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031113","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT For years, the Colombian state maintained its position about how the guerrillas’ involvement with drug trafficking has made them lose their political and/or ideological nature. Political and military sectors supported this approach and used the term narco-guerrilla or narco-terrorists. The peace process initiated in 2012 during the Santos administration seemed to alter this narrative. This article analyzes how Colombia’s peace process had a contradictory effect on the ‘narco-terrorist’ characterization of the FARC-EP: it opened windows of opportunity both for more peace-prone discourses and for an even more virulent version of the criminalization of the guerrillas.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"123 - 144"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45939364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crime, violence, and coercive power","authors":"S. Malešević","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033097","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Social scientists regularly differentiate sharply between crime and political violence. They often argue that unlike the political forms of violence such as wars, terrorism, or revolutions the criminal acts of violence lack clearly defined ideological aims. In this short contribution, I reflect on the special issue articles which all successfully challenge this dichotomy. Furthermore, I expand on these arguments to emphasize the centrality of coercive power in the development and legitimation of social orders throughout history.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"157 - 162"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44083145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The criminalization of politics, the politics of criminalization and their paradoxes","authors":"C. Olsson","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033099","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033099","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The notion of the criminalization of the state is paradoxical. On the one hand, the idea that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ might shed light on the potentially criminal behaviour of state-officials. On the other, the assumption that legal rules are general and anonymous, that they apply identically to everybody (and that allows defining these elites as criminals), is in its contemporary form linked to the bureaucratic rule of the state itself. In this commentary on the contributions to this special issue, I address this and other paradoxes of the state with regard to the relation between politics and criminality.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"163 - 169"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47717987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Levantados de la Selva. Vidas y Legitimidades en los Territorios Cocaleros [Raised from the jungle: lives and legitimacies in the coca-growing territories]","authors":"Jenniffer Vargas Reina","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033103","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033103","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"174 - 179"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44276288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Indirect rule, intra-systemic actors and impasses: a review","authors":"José A. Gutiérrez Danton","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033101","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2033101","url":null,"abstract":"Paramilitarism in Colombia has a very specific meaning: we are referring to counterinsurgent groups, which typically have an openly right-wing and conservative agenda, often operating with the tolerance, if not the collusion, sectors of the State. It has been a massive phenomenon in Colombia: in 2005 some 30,000 members of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC -United Self-Defences of Colombia) demobilised. Though there is still debate over how many of those were real combatants, still it is a massive figure particularly for a country that already has around 500,000 men in its armed forces and police. As such, Colombian paramilitarism has been subject to much academic interest for a long time, as expressed in an ever-growing academic and grey literature on the subject (see for example, Grajales 2011, Grajales 2013, 2017, Medina 1990, Medina and Téllez 1994, HRW 2001, Duncan 2006, Piccoli 2008, Hristov 2009, 2014, López and Ávila 2010, Zelik 2015). Why another book on this matter then? The book of Gutiérrez-Sanín stands aside on a number of grounds that make it not only worth reading to anybody interested in the Colombian conflict, but also, in my humble opinion, the finest addition to date to this literature.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"183 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60150972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Illicit economies and political opportunity. the case of the Colombian paramilitaries (1982-2007)","authors":"Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031110","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT There is an ambiguous and complex role of narcotrafficking and illicit economies in the growth of the paramilitary political power and influence. As argued in this paper, there are four mechanisms through which criminal involvement politicized paramilitaries: escalation, extension, regulation, and intermediation. These mechanisms gave them the opportunity to decisively broaden their constituencies, legitimize their activity, network with clientelistic actors from a position of force, and significantly broaden their inroads. Nonetheless, as discussed in the paper, the paramilitaries got trapped by the coalitional mismatch between the two global wars that were being waged in Colombia: counterinsurgent and war on drugs.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"80 - 100"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45420008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect: criminalised economies and state-building in the Colombian conflict","authors":"J. Gutiérrez, Estefanía Ciro","doi":"10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2022.2031109","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Illegal economies have received substantial attention in conflict studies over the past decades. Often, this attention is linked to economicist paradigms, rendering invisible the political processes linking conflict and illegal economies. By discussing the Colombian case, we argue that criminalisation is linked to patterns of capital accumulation and State-building. First, it reflects a long-term conflict of Proudhonian overtones between small-scale producers and big capital; secondly, it reflects a Tillyian process but without a Tillyian effect. Thus, the interaction between capital accumulation, political power and warfare takes place, without the expected result of a centralised and efficient, democratic State.","PeriodicalId":45560,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Political Power","volume":"15 1","pages":"29 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41639025","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}