What do you think?
Rate this book
States and Illegal Practices
Joining theories of states and state formation with theories of illegal practices, this pioneering book traces the unholy alliance of official practices with criminality. Criminal subcultures, mafias and gangs have been the subject of a great deal of attention, as have formal policy approaches of the state. However, the interaction of state police apparatuses with illegal practices has been neglected, despite the recent Foucauldian emphasis on discourses of power, order and disorder. Written by leading experts in the fields of anthropology and history, this book asks why illegal practices -- including corruption and protection rackets -- do not disappear, but continue to thrive. It examines the development of transnational illegal networks, such as the narcotics trade and the new trade in environmentally restricted commodities, as well as how culture, ethnicity and economic considerations drive illegal practices and influence state policy. Wide-ranging in scope, this interdisciplinary book will appeal to anyone studying the sociology of crime and of the state, political science, criminal justice and the law, the anthropology of law and of the state and the history of crime.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1999
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 10, 2015
From Intro by Josiah Heyman:
* The "extentionist thesis": that "illegal markets are nothing more than normal markets in which entrepreneurs have been enticed by demand to overstep the bounds of the law in search of higher profits" (4).
* The "battle for legitimacy" concerns how il/legality is "an outcome of struggles in both discursive and practical arenas.... Emphasizing practices and processes rather than riles or structures provides a space within which indeterminacy, ambiguity and double-dealing can be analyzed more clearly" (7).
* Historically, "'military entrepreneurs' switched between legal and illegal positions in an overall building and accumulative process" - legitimacy was an outcome of political contestation, not an ontological fact: "the modern state is not made up of law and order alone, but a complex web of the legal and the illegal that justifies our enterprise." (9). "We view illegal practices not as a category of abnormal behaviors, especially not as the subculture of a stigmatized group, but rather as an option, a resource, that diverse groups used at various times" (13).
* It is important to "recognize the hegemonic character of reified law while leaving room for struggle, persistence and process in actual uses of law" (14).
* "The more formal and more informal social organizations of illegality do not stand apart from each other, but rather illegality mutates between them according to opportunity and temporal development" (18).
* Breaks down the presumed identity of illegality with secrecy on the one hand, and legality with openness on the other. In fact the social process of the production of the illicit means that there are significant zones of secrecy in the state and openness in illegality.
From Thomas Gallant
Basic thesis: illegal networks of armed predators were "deeply insinuated in the processes of state formation and state consolidation of power" as well as with the "spread and triumph of capitalism" (25). Specifically long-distance commodity chains from peripheral economies to the metropole created vast opportunities nor just for rent-seeking from state-legitimated authorities but also for, if you will, taxation entrepreneurs, with competing private commercial actors often dictating the terms of capitalist penetration more directly than any state authorities (30). "Military entrepreneurs... when they operated with the consent of the state or rulers, their depredations and activities were legitimate, as when they operated as guards on landed estates or plantations; but when they fell from political favor they became literally outlaws -- bandit" (33).
Alan Smart:
The dominant strain of rational choice is too narrow in it emphasis on rent-seeking - provides little account of why government responses are variable. Public choice theorists suggest that all governments are operated as predatory states whereas all agents are out to maximize their selfinterest. (102)
Alfred McCoy (a key text for any syllabus on the historical evolution of deviant globalization):
"As states expand, they often leave peripheries that are, like Khun Sa's native Shan State, poorly integrated into a central apparatus still struggling to take form... Economic change is constant and state configurations are in an endless state of flux, cohering and collapsing, with peripheries and interstices contracting and expanding" (130).
"At one level, Khun Sa is just another drug lord who would, through cunning and cicumstance, momentarily capture Burma;s heroin supply. Viewed differently, he seems by contrast a 'world historical' entrepreneur who would, through sheer force of personality, recast Burma's opium trade and use it to reshape both local politics and global traffic." His signal failure was in his attempt to convert his "illicit" trading empire into a legitimate political alternative: "By investing all his resources in the Shan national cause, he sacrificed the outlaw's room for maneuver that had served him so well. Indeed, by building this capital as a symbol of Shan independence, he created a fixed target for the inevitable Burmese attacks." (143)
"Major drug lords, protected by their states.... can only be arrested when the political economu of the producing regions shifts in ways that render them redundant -- stripping them of their local power, drug profits, and external support" (156).
McCoy supports the use of the term "bandits" to describe such figures: "It means simply an armed group that engages in some form of illicit economic activity outside the law's reach -- whether in slums, mountains, forest, swamp, strand, or seas. Beyond those whom we might consider simply outlaws -- smugglers, pirates, thieves, and highwaymen -- these interstices also provide refuge for those who mix economic and political roles. In eras and areas where central rule is weak, these more complex characters can sometimes win sufficient political power to become, depending on the strength of the state, rebels or warlords. If central authority weakens, as it did in China during the 1920s, then outlaws can become regional warlords with de facto autonomy and legitimacy." (159)
As "states impose a coerce control apparatus - as rents, taxes, exemptions, protections, customs duties, tax farms, and prohibitions - that creates opportunities for illicit entrepreneurs. Through smuggling, counterfeiting, and bootlegging, these outlaws are not merely rational individuals responding to illicit opportunity, but are, more broadly, actors reconciling arbitrary state policy with economic rationality" (160)
Carolyn Humphrey:
In post-Soviet Russia, "non-governmental rule enforcers are more efficient than the state because they are less arbitrary, closer to ordinary peoples' lives, and, significantly, have incentives (their own profit) to relate the costs of their activities to the benefits of those to whom the rules are related." (200)
The important point about post-Soviet economic crime is that the racketeering pre-dated perestroika -- and that perestroika merely liberated those tendencies to flourish.
Commonly it is assume that the state is identified with the law, and illegal networks consist of those people who are beyond either the state or the law" - but this was hardly the case in (post-Soviet) Russia. (203) "What the rackets sell is law, or more correctly, the idea that they are the kind of people who HAVE LAW" (213).
Revolutionaries borrowed ideas from bandits and the revolutionary act of expropriation was recognized at the time as a version of honorable banditry.Law, by contrast, "was seen as a bourgeois invention, devised to protect the alien institution of property rights, and it had no place in socialist society" (203). "Many gangs see themselves as raiders on an outsider world, avoiding the complications of predation on home ground." (218)
"Security firms and mafias are essentially similar, in that they are both profit-seekers who have incentives to enforce rules that encourage the production of goods that people want. However, mafias paradoxically also have a punitive, predatory aspect to their 'law', deriving from their historical tradition as thieves as well as from requirements of internal control and external conflict" (225).
If bandits are to take part in the reconstruction of the post-Soviet state, whereby the state gains "full control over the means of violence, the bandits must acquire a new sense of law. For the bandits' 'law' is really aimed at regulating themselves, and fails utterly in imagination when faced with tasks such as general taxation and state services." (225)
* The "extentionist thesis": that "illegal markets are nothing more than normal markets in which entrepreneurs have been enticed by demand to overstep the bounds of the law in search of higher profits" (4).
* The "battle for legitimacy" concerns how il/legality is "an outcome of struggles in both discursive and practical arenas.... Emphasizing practices and processes rather than riles or structures provides a space within which indeterminacy, ambiguity and double-dealing can be analyzed more clearly" (7).
* Historically, "'military entrepreneurs' switched between legal and illegal positions in an overall building and accumulative process" - legitimacy was an outcome of political contestation, not an ontological fact: "the modern state is not made up of law and order alone, but a complex web of the legal and the illegal that justifies our enterprise." (9). "We view illegal practices not as a category of abnormal behaviors, especially not as the subculture of a stigmatized group, but rather as an option, a resource, that diverse groups used at various times" (13).
* It is important to "recognize the hegemonic character of reified law while leaving room for struggle, persistence and process in actual uses of law" (14).
* "The more formal and more informal social organizations of illegality do not stand apart from each other, but rather illegality mutates between them according to opportunity and temporal development" (18).
* Breaks down the presumed identity of illegality with secrecy on the one hand, and legality with openness on the other. In fact the social process of the production of the illicit means that there are significant zones of secrecy in the state and openness in illegality.
From Thomas Gallant
Basic thesis: illegal networks of armed predators were "deeply insinuated in the processes of state formation and state consolidation of power" as well as with the "spread and triumph of capitalism" (25). Specifically long-distance commodity chains from peripheral economies to the metropole created vast opportunities nor just for rent-seeking from state-legitimated authorities but also for, if you will, taxation entrepreneurs, with competing private commercial actors often dictating the terms of capitalist penetration more directly than any state authorities (30). "Military entrepreneurs... when they operated with the consent of the state or rulers, their depredations and activities were legitimate, as when they operated as guards on landed estates or plantations; but when they fell from political favor they became literally outlaws -- bandit" (33).
Alan Smart:
The dominant strain of rational choice is too narrow in it emphasis on rent-seeking - provides little account of why government responses are variable. Public choice theorists suggest that all governments are operated as predatory states whereas all agents are out to maximize their selfinterest. (102)
Alfred McCoy (a key text for any syllabus on the historical evolution of deviant globalization):
"As states expand, they often leave peripheries that are, like Khun Sa's native Shan State, poorly integrated into a central apparatus still struggling to take form... Economic change is constant and state configurations are in an endless state of flux, cohering and collapsing, with peripheries and interstices contracting and expanding" (130).
"At one level, Khun Sa is just another drug lord who would, through cunning and cicumstance, momentarily capture Burma;s heroin supply. Viewed differently, he seems by contrast a 'world historical' entrepreneur who would, through sheer force of personality, recast Burma's opium trade and use it to reshape both local politics and global traffic." His signal failure was in his attempt to convert his "illicit" trading empire into a legitimate political alternative: "By investing all his resources in the Shan national cause, he sacrificed the outlaw's room for maneuver that had served him so well. Indeed, by building this capital as a symbol of Shan independence, he created a fixed target for the inevitable Burmese attacks." (143)
"Major drug lords, protected by their states.... can only be arrested when the political economu of the producing regions shifts in ways that render them redundant -- stripping them of their local power, drug profits, and external support" (156).
McCoy supports the use of the term "bandits" to describe such figures: "It means simply an armed group that engages in some form of illicit economic activity outside the law's reach -- whether in slums, mountains, forest, swamp, strand, or seas. Beyond those whom we might consider simply outlaws -- smugglers, pirates, thieves, and highwaymen -- these interstices also provide refuge for those who mix economic and political roles. In eras and areas where central rule is weak, these more complex characters can sometimes win sufficient political power to become, depending on the strength of the state, rebels or warlords. If central authority weakens, as it did in China during the 1920s, then outlaws can become regional warlords with de facto autonomy and legitimacy." (159)
As "states impose a coerce control apparatus - as rents, taxes, exemptions, protections, customs duties, tax farms, and prohibitions - that creates opportunities for illicit entrepreneurs. Through smuggling, counterfeiting, and bootlegging, these outlaws are not merely rational individuals responding to illicit opportunity, but are, more broadly, actors reconciling arbitrary state policy with economic rationality" (160)
Carolyn Humphrey:
In post-Soviet Russia, "non-governmental rule enforcers are more efficient than the state because they are less arbitrary, closer to ordinary peoples' lives, and, significantly, have incentives (their own profit) to relate the costs of their activities to the benefits of those to whom the rules are related." (200)
The important point about post-Soviet economic crime is that the racketeering pre-dated perestroika -- and that perestroika merely liberated those tendencies to flourish.
Commonly it is assume that the state is identified with the law, and illegal networks consist of those people who are beyond either the state or the law" - but this was hardly the case in (post-Soviet) Russia. (203) "What the rackets sell is law, or more correctly, the idea that they are the kind of people who HAVE LAW" (213).
Revolutionaries borrowed ideas from bandits and the revolutionary act of expropriation was recognized at the time as a version of honorable banditry.Law, by contrast, "was seen as a bourgeois invention, devised to protect the alien institution of property rights, and it had no place in socialist society" (203). "Many gangs see themselves as raiders on an outsider world, avoiding the complications of predation on home ground." (218)
"Security firms and mafias are essentially similar, in that they are both profit-seekers who have incentives to enforce rules that encourage the production of goods that people want. However, mafias paradoxically also have a punitive, predatory aspect to their 'law', deriving from their historical tradition as thieves as well as from requirements of internal control and external conflict" (225).
If bandits are to take part in the reconstruction of the post-Soviet state, whereby the state gains "full control over the means of violence, the bandits must acquire a new sense of law. For the bandits' 'law' is really aimed at regulating themselves, and fails utterly in imagination when faced with tasks such as general taxation and state services." (225)
Displaying 1 of 1 review