This book revisits and reframes the old, but active, debate on the relationship between criminality and civil war by bringing both the state and political power into the equation. It argues that the terms in which the debate is generally posed are still inadequate to address the complexities of this relationship, showing how criminalisation and de-criminalisation are deeply political and hotly contested processes. The shifting movements towards the separation -or convergence- between criminality and politics are part of the processes of constitution of both political power and state. The chapters in the volume flesh out the mechanisms and social dynamics through which this takes place.
This edited volume will be of great interest to upper-level students, academics, and researchers in Politics, History and Criminology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Power.
Introduction—State, political power and criminality in civil war: an editorial revisiting old debates from different angles 1 Power and crime: a theoretical sketch 2 Tillyian process without a Tillyian effect: criminalised economies and statebuilding in the Colombian conflict 3 The difference mafias make: a triadic model of organized crime in ethnic conflicts 4 Illicit economies and political opportunity: the case of the Colombian paramilitaries (1982–2007) 5 Organized crime in Serbian politics during the Yugoslav wars 6 Colombian state reactions to peace: the legacies of the narcoguerrillanarcoterrorist discourses 7 The varieties of paramilitaries paper present to Dublin zoom conference June 10, 2021 8 Violence diffusion, illegal accumulation and norms of criminal authority: alternative configurations of politics and power in the 21st century? 9 Crime, violence, and coercive power 10 The criminalization of politics, the politics of criminalization and their paradoxes
Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín is Professor and Researcher at the Institute of Political Studies and International Relations at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia. José A. Gutiérrez is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium and Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia.
