Gangsters and Other Statesmen: Mafias, Separatists, and Torn States in a Globalized World

by Danilo Mandic

How global organized crime shapes the politics of borders in modern conflicts

Separatism has been on the rise across the world since the end of the Cold War, dividing countries through political strife, ethnic conflict, and civil war, and redrawing the political map. Gangsters and Other Statesmen examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making.

Danilo Mandić conducted fieldwork in the disputed territories of Kosovo and South Ossetia, talking to mobsters, separatists, and policymakers in war zones and along major smuggling routes. In this timely and provocative book, he demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Blending extensive archival sleuthing and original ethnographic data with insights from sociology and other disciplines, Mandić argues that organized crime can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict.

Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, Gangsters and Other Statesmen raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.

296 pages, Paperback

Published December 1, 2020

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant if sometimes dizzyingly in-the-weeds account of how economic gangsters and ethnic separatist movements interact, focused primarily on Kosovo (where the gangsters aligned with the separatists and then after winning their independence became the leaders of the newly independent country) and South Ossetia, where the gangsters preferred to maintain a luminal space from which they could profit from various forms of moral arbitrage.

[Yousef · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eminently pathbreaking book based in the literature tradition of political science, although more criminological theories could be consulted. The author found that mafia is an inherent third person that mediates and intervenes the dyadic relation between state and separatism. There are conditions for the three to convert into each other, and none is innately exclusive of others. State can be formed by profiteering mafia who was at one point separatist movement. Mafia also needs not to be violent and smuggling illegal contraband of high publicity either (as in the case of Kosovo), they facilitate daily commerce across borders and create peacemaking opportunities (such as in the case of South Ossetia).

[Lance Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is not only a super unique and interesting read, it was also extremely helpful for my research. It’s not easy to do research on corruption or crime and even more difficult in regions with no legally recognized status. Kudos to the author for accomplishing such a book, a collection of stories and facts told in an intriguing way.