Territorial Masquerades

Traffick

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Bhattacharyya, Gargi. 2005. Traffick: The Illicit Movement of People and Things. London: Pluto Books.

Gargi Bhattacharyya argues that the wave of global politics marked by the creation of Bretton Woods financial institutions provided ripe conditions for the explosion of illicit trafficking of people and things. She considers four cases to make her argument: drug, gun, and human trafficking as well as organized crime more generally. While pundits often paint illicit trafficking in our neoliberal world of contemporary globalization as some kind of economic aberration, an ugly scourge to be eliminated, Bhattacharyya’s main claim is that the global reach of these illicit industries is made possible thanks to their intricate relation with legal economic processes and formal policies. Though the parasitism is often presented in the opposite direction, she contends that legal economic relations are also reliant on illegal ones—especially in terms of access to labor, financialization, and market formation. As the book jacket claims, “Without [the illegal economy], globalization cannot access cheap labor, it cannot reach vulnerable new markets, and it cannot finance expansion into the places most ravaged by human suffering.” Continue reading →

Posted in Drugs, Illegality, Law, Networks, Political Economy, The State | Comments Off

The Global Criminal Economy

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Castells, Manuel. 2000. “The Perverse Connection: The Global Criminal Economy.” In End of Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Oxford: Blackwell. [Chapter 3]

Manuel Castells sums up the scope, scale, and importance of the global criminal economy in this chapter. The major leader in this criminal economy is the illegal drug trade. Besides enumerating this vast “shadow economy” and identifying it’s various parts, he spends a good chunk of the chapter highlighting the criminal transition to capitalism that accompanied the final decline of the Soviet Union. One report from the Italian government called this criminal underworld a “genuine criminal counter-power” (171). As I often note, while of course true in some respects, it’s clear that illegal economies have a much more complex relationship to power “proper” than is often admitted—from high finance to material, local investments. The difficulty, of course, is that the power of this dark economy is precisely constituted by its supposed invisibility. As Castells notes, it still behooves us to try to study it (173). Continue reading →

Posted in Drugs, Elites, Illegality, Law, Networks, Political Economy, Scale, The State | 1 Comment

State Formation as Organized Crime

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Tilly, Charles. 1985. “State Formation as Organized Crime.” In Evans, Peter, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol eds. Bringing the State Back In Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Charles Tilly draws an analogy between organized crime, with its practices of “protection,” and state making. He makes a direct causal, sequential link between war-making and state-making in European history. Tilly writes: “A portrait of war makers and state makers as coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs bears a far greater resemblance to the facts than do its chief alternatives”—most of all, the illusory social contract (169). He flatly adds, “War makes states” (170). His argument is that states organize violence in ways similar to organized crime; states simply do it on a larger scale. His basic argument is as follows: Continue reading →

Posted in Bandits, Illegality, Law, Pirates, Territory | 1 Comment

Violent Entrepreneurs

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Volkov, Vadim. 2002. Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Vadim Volkov’s extremely impressive book details how an entire class of “violent entrepreneurs” became the handmaidens of the Soviet transition to capitalism and the reconstitution of the Russian state in the 1990s. The fall of the Soviet regime, argues Volkov, created a situation of near-Hobbesian proportion in which no central authority could maintain control over the use of force. Violence became the main resource through which both a burgeoning capitalist system and a teetering government were consolidated. Several sorts of everyday cultural infrastructures were repurposed in this violent political and economic transition: from previous criminal traditions to disenfranchised athletes—wrestlers, boxers, martial artists—and other specialists in violence (e.g. war veterans, disaffected military officers). These violent entrepreneurs not only enriched themselves, they also provided the necessary protection and market conditions needed for market relations. They became both enforcers and owners of capital. And eventually the state managed to absorb some of their institutional innovations. Continue reading →

Posted in Bandits, Critique, Dialectics, Elites, Everyday Life, Illegality, Law, Networks, Power, Sovereignty, The State, Violence | Comments Off

The Mafia of a Sicilian Village

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Blok, Anton. 1974. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. Cambridge: Waveland Press.

Anton Blok’s Mafia of a Sicilian Village is one of my favorite books. It shows how “the mafia” in Sicily emerged as network that grew out of a complex political-economic conjuncture over a 100-year period. This massive story is humbly and sparsely told through the life of a Sicilian village of no more than a couple thousand residents. Considering the violence and secrecy surrounding mafia, Blok’s two years of patient ethnographic study paid off: he gained access to the accounts of intimate rivalries, blood feuds, and networks of corruption surrounding this phenomenon. Blok also succeeds in showing mafia’s deep roots in rural Sicilian society. It’s a story about landowners and peasants though never losing sight of the broader societal forces of which these actors are a part. The book is an impeccable example of a study that’s able to show the relations and innerworkings of dialectical and conjunctural forces at various scales. His findings show that mafiosi are, above all, middlemen, power-brokers that not only mediate relations between peasants and the state, but also relations between landowners and peasants. Of course, that’s not all they are…

Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Elites, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Law, Networks, Power, Scale, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Moore, Barrington. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press.

Barrington Moore’s classic study seeks to understand the role of landed upper classes and peasants in the makings of capitalist democracy, fascism, and communism as distinct paths to modernity. Unavoidably, the book leads him to explore the role of commercial agriculture and urban classes as key factors in determining the various political outcomes in the following contexts: eighteenth century England and France, the U.S. Civil War, revolutionary China, fascist Japan, and post-colonial India. He finds that breaking the power of landed agrarian elites is key for the rise of democratic regimes. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Elites, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Post-Colonial, The State | Comments Off

Coffee and Power

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Paige, Jeffery M. 1997. Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in Central America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Jeffrey Paige’s book Coffee and Power is an exemplary piece of comparative research. In addressing three Central American countries tortured path toward democratization, he could not have picked more distinct cases: social-democratic Costa Rica, the Sandinista’s revolutionary Nicaragua, and the Orwellian El Salvador of the death squads. However, despite the zenith of these dramatic differences in the 1980s, all three countries ended up embracing neoliberal reforms and relatively free multi-party elections a decade later. In explaining this complex trajectory, Paige goes back to the critical years after the Great Depression—with Costa Rica (in its fullest blossom) slightly later—in which all three countries experienced popular insurgencies. He ties both revolutionary moments (1930s and 1980s) to the world-economic crisis immediately preceding each period. In any case, the struggles of the past were hugely consequential for the subsequent socialist revolutions from below that ultimately unraveled into the neoliberal so-called “end of history.” Throughout, Paige explains all this as, fundamentally, a story of shifting class relations. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Elites, Historical-Geographies, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Political Economy, Post-Colonial, Power, Terror, The State, Violence | Comments Off

London’s Burning and that Little Four-Letter Word: Riot

Posted on August 13, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

This past week was record-setting in terms of site visits to Territorial Masquerades. The extraordinary numbers had everything to do with the street protests in London. Events apparently sent people in droves to the Internet searching for anything related to E.P. Thompson’s writing on the the moral economy of the English crowd, which I’ve surveyed in a post that reviews his essay, “Moral Economy of the English Crowd.” Thompson warned against the deceptive simplicity of that little four-letter word—riot. I think there is a lot in that essay that can speak to recent events.

In related news, the journal Society and Space has put out a special virtual issue on “Urban Disorder and Policing,” a kind of greatest hits from the Environment and Planning family on urban revolt and repression. I like the piece by Peter jackson.

Posted in City, Spatiality, Violence | 1 Comment

The Logic of Violence in Civil War

Posted on August 11, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In this massive study, Stathis Kalyvas argues that violence in civil war complies with a peculiar logic. It’s this logic that explains and fixes together the following four puzzles: The anomaly that one village is utterly brutalized, and the neighboring one spared; why civil wars are particularly violent; the way hardened camp mentality diffuses in local contexts into much more fluid allegiances and identities; discrepancies between macro and micro causes/explanations of war. Kalyvas’ main argument is that it all comes down to how combatant groups try to shape civilian collaboration. His account is not about the origins of civil wars, but their violent course of actions once they already exist. Continue reading →

Posted in Carl Schmitt, Frontiers, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Michel Foucault, Sovereignty, Territory, The State, Violence | Comments Off

Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Wolf, Eric. 1969. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press.

Eric Wolf surveys the histories of six different cases of peasant involvement in rebellions and revolutions in the twentieth century. In the final chapter, he draws a series of conclusions from his case studies of revolutions in Mexico, Russia, China, Viet Nam, Algeria, and Cuba. One of the book’s most far-reaching claims is that the middle-peasantry, owners of family-worked smallholdings, is the most potentially revolutionary agrarian sector. The social existence of poor peasants, including landless ones, is far too precarious to engage in risky revolutionary action; though, they will if they are well protected (which assumes that some sort of organized oppositional upheaval is already underway). Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Bandits, Frontiers, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Land, Scale, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment