Contenu du sommaire : Les mafias

The Mafia, State and Society in Sicily (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) Paolo Pezzino According to recent historical research, the Sicilian Mafia is a strongly structuralized criminal organization, of which power results of its ability to use violence, to control a territory and to develop links with political institutions and public agencies. The article examines the way in which this organization was formed in the Nineteenth century (since the end of feodalism in Sicily) and the reasons of its expansion until now. The article stresses the process of adaptation of the Mafia to the social and economic modernization of Sicily, and the evolution of the relationships between the Mafia and politics (which is one of the most important cause of such an adaptation).

Criminal Networks and Social Capital: The Case of the Italian Mafia Rocco Sciarrone The article examines the characteristics and the distinctive features of mafia organizations, with particular attention to the processes of territorial embeddedness and diffusion. Territorial dimension, political aspects and organizational structure of mafia groups are carried out in the light of the theoretical approach of the social capital, referring to the availabilility of resources placed in social networks. The thesis is that mafia reproduces itself in time and space thanks to its ability to accumulate and use social capital. In fact, a large part of its power derives from its ability to obtain the cooperation of other actors, outside its organizational core, that is from its ability to contract relationships of collusion and complicity with some spheres of the civil society and political institutions.

Violent Entrepreneurship in Post-Communist Russia Vadim Volkov The article is about the role of organized violence in the process of market building and state building in Russia since the end of communist regime. The main function of violent entrepreneurship, criminal as well as legal, consists in «enforcement partnership» : that is a business function of an organized group, deriving from the use of actual or potential force on a commercial basis, employed to maintain certain institutional conditions of business activities, such as security, contract enforcement, dispute settlement and transaction insurance. The booming of violent entrepreneurship in Russia means in fact that the state has lost the monopoly of the legitimate violence. What appears as the crisis of the state takes the form of covert fragmentation : the emergence, on the territory under the formal juridiction of the state, of competing and uncontrolled sources of organized violence.

Between Pragmatism and Violence. The Strategies of the Colombian «Mafias» Daniel Pecaut The paper is about the Colombian «mafias» and about their political strategies since the development of the narcotic economy (especially with cocaine) in the eighties. These strategies change since this time, because the interests of the mafia groups are diversified, and because of external pressures (in particular by the United States). The narcotraffikers become progressively central protagonists of a «political» system of interaction, in which participate different groups using means (legal and illegal) of violence.

War Making and State Making as Organized Crime Charles Tilly The article illustrates the analogy of war making and state making with organized crime, from the experience of European national states during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The formation of national states is a direct resuit of the way in which some state-makers succeeded in protecting large part of population in a particular territory and in using for this organized means of violence. The article argues that war making, extraction, state making, and protection are interdependent and that this interdependence explains the forms and the structures of the différent national states in Europe.

The Construction of an Improbable Territory. Inter-commune Structures and Local Councillors in Thiérache Emmanuelle Bonerandi The legislative revival of the inter-commune policy in France (law ATR of 1992 and law ADT from 1995) has involved the creation and/or the re-creation of decisional perimeters on the national territory. The study of these new grids introduces two major questionnements at the cross of the geography and political sciences, namely, on the one hand, their capacity to reveal local geopolitical structures (territories of elected officiais and of power) and, on the other hand, their capacity to be lasted and to perennialize themselves in time and space (obsolescence but also inertia of the administrative territories). In addition, these creations/re-creations give in light a central debate in geography between territory of the geographer and territory of the developer putting back the statute of the geography applied, or active geography, in the fields of the «academic» geography. We propose to clear up these interrogations through the study of a particular space, Thiérache, true laboratory of farmland development carrying a strong and old intercommunality but more especially spaces with the identity and paradoxical territorial legitimacy.