Protection Rackets Research Articles

Taxation and incarceration in Guatemala: Prisons, protection rackets, and citizenship

This article explores the making of carceral citizenship in Guatemala through an ethnographic analysis of la talacha – informal prison taxation schemes. Taxation is a key technology of citizenship. Tax enforcement mechanisms, the distribution of tax burdens, citizens’ willingness to pay, and their expectations of what they should get in return all make taxation an essential lens through which to understand state formation and citizens’ perceptions of and relations with one another. In Guatemala, where organized crime competes with and subsumes state institutions in ways that profoundly impact everyone, the state is only one of many entities claiming the right to tax, at turns competing and colluding with its underworld. These blurred dynamics are hyper-distilled in the country’s prison system, where state-prisoner networks tax the imprisoned population in the name of collective survival and elite profits. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork behind bars, I show how la talacha sets the terms of carceral citizenship by organizing prisoner-state co-governance, reifying the prison’s socioeconomic hierarchies, and shaping inmates' relationships with the world beyond the prison. Resumen: Fiscalidad y encarcelaciones en Guatemala: Prisiones, extorsiones y ciudadanía Este artículo explora la construcción de la ciudadanía carcelaria en Guatemala a través de un análisis etnográfico de la talacha: esquema informal de tributación carcelaria. La fiscalidad es una tecnología clave de la ciudadanía. Los mecanismos de aplicación de impuestos, la distribución de las cargas fiscales, la disposición de los ciudadanos a pagar y sus expectativas de lo que deberían obtener a cambio hacen de la fiscalidad una lente esencial a través de la cual entender la formación del Estado y las percepciones de los ciudadanos y las relaciones entre ellos. En Guatemala, donde el crimen organizado compite con las instituciones estatales y las subsume en formas que afectan profundamente a todos, el Estado es sólo una de las muchas entidades que reclaman el derecho a tributar, compitiendo y confabulando a su vez con el hampa. Estas dinámicas difusas se hiperdestilan en el sistema penitenciario del país, donde las redes entre el Estado y los presos gravan a la población reclusa en nombre de la supervivencia colectiva y los beneficios de las élites. Basándome en un extenso trabajo de campo etnográfico entre rejas, muestro cómo la talacha establece los términos de la ciudadanía carcelaria organizando el cogobierno entre presos y Estado, reificando las jerarquías socioeconómicas de la prisión y configurando las relaciones de los reclusos con el mundo más allá de la cárcel.

Policy Regime Analysis of Border Security Governance in Myanmar: A Preliminary Case Study of Myawaddy (2020–2021)

This study is a case-study research that explores the anatomy of Myanmar’s border security governance using the Myawaddy Township as an exploratory case study. To explore how the Burmese borderlands, represented by Myawaddy, have been governed, the policy–regime approach is adopted as a conceptual framework to illustrate the idiosyncrasies, including relevant parties and their interactions. It was found that the following actors are involved in the security governance of borderlands: ethnic armed organisation, local bureaucratic agencies, Border Guard Forces (BGFs) and foreign interest groups. Prima facie, civil government agencies have performed their duties of overseeing border activities; however, they appear to have only de jure authority, serving as soft infrastructures for the lawful border economy. Contrarily, Karen BGF leaders, appointed by the Tatmadaw (i.e. Myanmar armed forces), have held de facto authority, controlling and benefiting from the border’s shadow economy—which is marked by gambling businesses—as well as from running protection rackets. Still, the BGF units in Myawaddy have retained a considerable degree of autonomy without necessarily following the Tatmadaw’s order. In a nutshell, border security governance in Myanmar’s Myawaddy consists of several governing modes existing in parallel and, hence, it is prismatic in nature

Illicit City-Making and Its Materialities. Introduction to the Special Issue

Provoked by Charles Tilly’s analogy of state-making as organized crime (1985), this issue aims at better understanding the material conditions of illicit city-making – that is, of urbanization and criminal governance, as well as the criminalizing discourses and strategies that underpin them. In opposition to the liberalist paradigm of states vs. illegitimate enemies, Tilly proposed to see the dynamics of state-making (and the negotiation of protection and extraction involved therein) as akin to the dynamics of organized crime. After all, both seek to establish territorial sovereignty based on their capacity to monopolize violence. More importantly, this analogy illuminates the way in which states can enact their protection rackets without a pre-established legitimate authority. Bringing this analogy to the urban realm – seeing city-making as continuously imbricated in attempts to foster the legitimacy of heterogeneously authored protection rackets – this special issue elicits the practices, flows, extraction, and actors involved in illicit city-making, as well as the processes that deem them so.

Police Protection Rackets and Political Modernity in Mexico

This article provides a long-term historical periodization of federal police agencies under Mexico's single-party regime (1930s–2000). Based on archival findings in Mexico and the United States, as well as interviews with former law-enforcement officials, the article documents and reflects, in particular, on the entanglements between federal policing agencies and organized crime (police protection rackets). Drawing from bandit studies and critical perspectives on policing, the article argues police protection rackets to be an integral but overlooked mechanism in Mexico's modern state-formation process. The article also hints at the important but largely overlooked role of police protection rackets in the making of capitalist modernity more generally.

Political economy of cross-border income shifting: A protection racket approach

Multinational firms often shift their incomes to low-tax jurisdictions, thus robbing host states of tax revenue. I offer a new theory to explain why some firms do this while others do not. I argue that firms that are more vulnerable to government expropriation are, counterintuitively, less likely to shift income offshore, since complying fully with tax law gives the government a greater stake in their survival. Analyzing a registry-based panel data on multinational firms, their tax burdens, and a cross-sectional information of the firms’ connections to tax havens, l find that, other things equal, firms with more concentrated fixed assets are less likely to use havens. These results challenge existing theories of the political economy of development. Whereas the “Pillars of Prosperity” theory suggests that successful states simultaneously develop protection of property rights and fiscal capacity, my results show that perfect property rights protection can actually undermine the state’s ability to tax.

Sustaining the Environment in an Era of Small-Scale Mining in Ghana: Optimizing the Role of Institutions

The study aimed at assessing the common constraints that affect the enforcement of small-scale mining laws and regulations which have created a vacuum for illegal operators to infiltrate the space with the associated environmental and social cost implications. Underpinned by the institutional theory, the study analyzes from existing theoretical and empirical studies to assess why institutions and agencies on artisanal and small-scale mining find it difficult to clamp down on illegal gold extractive activities. Retrospective literature analysis was the main method employed by the study. A synthesis from the review suggests that key challenges revolve around poor allocation of resources, poor collaboration among multiple levels and sectors, protection rackets by powerful beings in society, connivance of some traditional authorities and members, poverty, green squeezing, and cumbersome nature of ASM licensing process in Ghana. The study contends on the one hand that laws, policies, and regulations are only as good as their enforcement; whilst on the other hand, enforcement is only as good as the laws and regulations formulated in the first place. The study discusses five policy suggestions that will go a long way to help enforcement of ASM policies and institutions in Ghana.

The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade

This book is based in a decade of extraordinary research in national, state, and local archives by its author and other scholars, principally Wil Pansters (I participated in two related conferences organized and funded by them). The mining of these archives, particularly the rarely visited state and local collections, along with the stimulating conferences, has already made a major contribution to the field of Mexican drug history, while published and forthcoming peer-reviewed essays and books will continue to make their mark for years to come.This book is the trade-book version of all that remarkable research. As Benjamin Smith informs the reader, “The Dope is a work of popular history. . . . As such, the text is unencumbered by the usual footnotes, endnotes, and the nods to academic allies. I hope that this makes what is a tough and complex topic more accessible and readable” (p. 378). The book certainly succeeds by this measure and will be extremely useful in introductory undergraduate courses on the subject. Scholars of course will find the lack of footnotes less appealing, and, like most popular histories, there's also a tendency to smooth over uncertainty with a more confident narrative than the existing evidentiary gaps probably warrant. But as far as pop drug history goes, this is as good as you will find to date on Mexico.As the title suggests, the book is on the illicit drug trade—there is very little here on the development of policy, ideology, or drug use. That narrow focus facilitates a relatively long-term overview, from the turn of the twentieth century down to the present. The book is strongest on the period from the Second World War to the 1990s. Developments since 2000 are well summarized but are a little too recent for a thorough historical treatment. The early twentieth-century material is the weakest. For example, calling marijuana “the drug of choice” of the Mexican Revolution's soldiers is both factually wrong (alcohol too is a drug) and a serious exaggeration of the extent of marijuana use at the time (p. 14). And between 2 and 4 percent of Americans were not addicted to morphine in the early twentieth century (the best estimates suggest that it was closer to 0.5 percent addicted to all opiates) (p. xx). I was curious as to the source for the latter claim, but the alphabetical and fragmentary format of the “notes on sources” made it difficult to identify.But there is also plenty of new and intriguing stuff here. Smith's most compelling argument is that the drug trade in Mexico has always been as much about “protection rackets” (with various actors imposing a tax on traffickers) as it has been about the trade in drugs. He argues that these rackets began in the early twentieth century as provincial affairs that served an almost philanthropic function—a kind of state-sponsored social banditry that funded the building of schools, parks, and so forth. In short, the drug trade wasn't always so bad. There was relatively little violence, few Mexicans were taking illegal drugs, and the proceeds went in part to worthy causes. But gradually competition over these protection rackets spawned violence. The first stage saw the Policía Judicial Federal move in on the rackets controlled by governors and state police. In the 1970s this shifted into high gear with the renewed involvement of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) (this challenges the oft-repeated claim that the DFS had controlled the trade since the 1940s). Smith argues that it was the rise of the protection rackets through the political food chain, along with pressure from the United States, that accelerated the violence. Then the 2000s saw an especially troubling turn as the drug gangs, their armies, and low-level thugs began extending these rackets into areas far afield from drugs, terrorizing ordinary citizens around the country.Yet readers are never given a clear answer as to why the corruption, violence, and general nihilism have gotten so wildly out of control. Smith suggests that there is nothing really special about Mexico: “The protection rackets were as extensive north of the border as they were south of it” (p. 227). This is surely wrong. There certainly has been plenty of corruption in the United States connected to drugs, but what Smith describes here in Mexico, decade after decade, involving countless governors, state and federal law enforcement officials, generals, and other military brass, up to presidents of the republic, is truly staggering. Protection rackets don't exist to this extent everywhere, so how do we explain them in Mexico?The answer to that question and others will have to wait for more scholarly products from all this wonderful research. For now we have a highly entertaining and accessible volume that will surely be read widely for years to come.

The Logic of Kidnapping in Civil War: Evidence from Colombia

Why do some armed groups kidnap for ransom? Despite a dramatic spike in kidnappings by political groups over the last several decades, there are scant existing explanations for why groups use this tool of coercion. Leveraging evidence from extensive interviews with former combatants from Colombia’s civil war, including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), as well as military and security personnel, I show that ransom kidnapping is used to enforce groups’ protection rackets, their main source of funding. Kidnapping is both the most lucrative way to punish tax evasion and an effective means of deterring future shirking. Thus, groups that tax local populations are more likely to kidnap; groups relying on external or voluntary forms of funding are less likely to take hostages. This article explains when we should see kidnapping in armed conflict, describing an underexplored way that selective violence bolsters insurgency.

The Manosphere as an Online Protection Racket: How the Red Pill Monetizes Male Need for Security in Modern Society

To effectively manage, empathize with and respond to the implications and impact of the so-called ‘Manosphere,’ this paper is centered on the premise that researchers require an understanding of the draw factors that lead individuals to engage, affiliate with, and contribute to the various groups that constitute this wider movement. This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of knowledge around the Manosphere by exploring how thought leaders propagate symbiotic cycles of ontological security and insecurity through YouTube in a manner that resembles a protection racket. It argues that these constructed ontological security cycles provide a powerful impetus to not only draw individuals into the Manosphere, but also to extract material and social resources out of them that can be reinvited to retain them within the movement.

Ethnic Protection Rackets: Turkish Cypriot Statebuilding before 1974

ABSTRACT For the ten years prior to the Turkish partition of Cyprus into Greek and Turkish Cypriot zones, the Turkish Cypriot community lived in distinct ethnic enclaves governed by a parallel Turkish Cypriot administration. I argue that Turkish Cypriot elites formed a system of reciprocal relations with their community by acting as ethnic protection racketeers. With few material resources, but a demand for protection during intercommunal fighting, Turkish Cypriot leaders monopolised protection over and within enclaves, while also deterring co-ethnics from leaving their protection despite poor conditions. Ultimately, this influenced Turkish Cypriot preferences in UN-led talks, demanding to retain autonomy over specific territories they controlled, especially in providing security.

Drug Smuggling and the Stability of Fragile States. The Diverging Trajectories of Mali and Niger

ABSTRACT What is the impact of smuggling on political ordering and stability in fragile states? We investigate how transnational drug smuggling networks affect protection and extraction dynamics, and drive divergent political stability trajectories in fragile countries that otherwise exhibit structural similiarities – i.e. Mali and Niger. Building on ethnographic evidence, we explore the hypothesis that distinctive peace- and state-building strategies result in different degrees of resilience vis-à-vis potentially destabilising factors. To explain variation in political stability we introduce the concept of ‘hybrid state-sponsored protection racket’, in which non-state armed actors are coopted in a protection assemblage under the tutelage of the state.

A cellular protection racket: How lysosomal Ca2+ fluxes prevent kidney injury

LC3-lipidation is activated by lysosomal damage by mechanisms that are unknown and divergent from canonical autophagy. In this study, Nakamura et al, show that lysosomal damage induced by lysosomotropic agents or oxalate in renal proximal tubule cells causes lipidated LC3 to insert into the lysosomal membrane to activate TRPML1 channels and release Ca2+ from lysosomes. This leads to TFEB dephosphorylation and translocation into the nucleus which results in clearance of damaged lysosomes and their contents which may reduce the deleterious effects of crystal nephropathy.

State Fragility and Organized Crime

There are always probabilities of strong relationships between transnational organized crime group, the government, semi-government agencies and irregular formations. Because, at the fundamental level, motivations and aspirations of all these agencies and groups may be similar, i.e. making as much money or profit as quickly as possible; whether in a semi-legitimate or illegitimate means and ways. For this, they will be ready to use any modus operandi; the end result and harm they cause to the nation and society will be the same. Therefore, more often it is also very difficult to distinguish them one from another. In this regard, they all can be termed “the silent partners” of the legitimate government agencies, semi-government corporations and the organized crime groups (OCGs) and wherever they belong: they converge at a single platform, i.e. the Organized Crime. Therefore, the silent partners of the Organized Crime Group can be any of these: a private party or person, a government officer or his office, a semi-government official or a group of people belonging to these organizations. There may be another similarity among these too;…i.e. they all do their utmost to avoid their appearance in public or willingly acknowledged their involvement in any form and deeds on such cooperative undertaking. There are many ways such organized syndicates apply their methods that may be soft, peaceful to even gruesomely violent means to get access to state power, money or government resources. In this regard, they may apply all types of legitimate and illegitimate means, to name the few, such as protection rackets, and capture public resources, seize of property and land forcibly in an illegitimate way, and eventually entry into the licit private sector by money laundering and other means.

Science as Gift, or Knowledge as the Offer That Cannot be Refused: Introducing Russian Science and Technology Studies

This article introduces a set of articles written by Russian social epistemologists and science and technology studies scholars based on research conducted in the first major Russian Academy funded project on science and technology studies. Most of the articles take off from Peter Galison’s concept of scientific ‘trading zones’. However, the author develops a theme found in Ilya Kasavin’s article on ‘science as gift’, which is designed to transcend both ‘capitalistic’ and ‘communistic’ conceptions of science. However, the resulting political economy of science as gift – albeit quite recognizable – resembles the practice of extortion in mutual protection rackets; hence, the ‘offer too good to refuse’.

The Politics of Criminal Victimization: Pursuing and Resisting Power

The conventional approach to criminal victimization views it as a traumatic but one-time act. This overlooks a layer of contentious and dynamic politics between victims and criminal actors that we have yet to analyze. I develop a new theoretical framework to analyze the strategic behaviors that victims and criminal actors use to pursue and resist power as part of the political process of criminal victimization. The framework enables us to better observe, conceptualize, and theorize how victims exercise agency vis-à-vis their criminal perpetrators, as well as behaviors and practices that criminal actors undertake to carry out and sustain victimization, but which are overlooked by the traditional focus on their use and threat of coercive force. I illustrate the framework’s analytic utility with an empirical analysis of the victimization of informal street vendors in a major Latin American city under a criminal protection racket. The argument and empirical findings suggest ways to expand and deepen the research agenda on the politics of criminal victimization.

State Regulation of Organized Crime: Politicians, Police, and Drug Trafficking in Argentina

ABSTRACTIn many developing countries with weak formal institutions, the protection of state actors is essential for organized criminal activities and illicit markets to emerge and thrive. This article examines the relationship between the state’s regulation of drug trafficking and its associated violence in highly fragmented markets. It argues that political competition influences coordination among the police, generating different types of regulatory regimes. Police with greater coordination implement protection rackets that curb violence; uncoordinated police carry out particularistic negotiations with drug traffickers that exacerbate criminal violence. This argument is illustrated with a subnational comparison of two Argentine provinces that experienced a similar drug market expansion with different patterns of violence. These cases show how corrupt states can obtain relative order in highly fragmented drug markets, and illustrate police influence in shaping the evolution of drug dealing in metropolitan areas.

Resisting Protection: Rackets, Resistance, and State Building

The state occupies a central place in the study of a range of political, economic, and social outcomes. This article brings into dialogue literature on the state and emerging research on criminal politics through a study of protection rackets. Conceiving of criminal protection rackets as institutional arrangements of extraction and domination, I develop a political economy framework to explain variation in forms of resistance to rackets. The framework shows that distinct configurations of economic and political resources influence the type of resistance available to subordinates. I illustrate the framework's utility using micro-level data on resistance to rackets in Latin America. Attention to how resource endowments shape patterns of resistance to projects of extraction and domination provides a novel window into the bottom-up dynamics of state building.

民主化後のインドネシアにおけるイスラームの「保守転回」――Michael Buehler, The Politics of Shari'a Law: Islamist Activists and theState in Democratizing Indonesia. (Cambridge University Press, 2015)／Ian Wilson, The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics. (Routledge, 2015)／Jeremy Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism. (Cambridge University Press, 2016)――

民主化後のインドネシアにおけるイスラームの「保守転回」――Michael Buehler, The Politics of Shari'a Law: Islamist Activists and theState in Democratizing Indonesia. (Cambridge University Press, 2015)／Ian Wilson, The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics. (Routledge, 2015)／Jeremy Menchik, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism. (Cambridge University Press, 2016)――

Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy by Jamie S. Davidson

Reviewed by: Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy by Jamie S. Davidson Thomas Pepinsky (bio) Jamie S. Davidson. Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 76 pp. Jamie Davidson’s Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy is an excellent overview of Indonesian politics since 1998. It offers enough basic detail to attract readers with no background in Indonesia, but also an argument that will interest Indonesia experts. Its format is unique, something between a long article and a short book. Cambridge University Press calls this publication format an “Element,” part of a new push by the press to find new ways to reach new audiences.1 My review nevertheless treats Indonesia: Twenty Years of Democracy as more or less a book, one that does not present new material so much as it integrates existing research to make a broader argument. I briefly speculate about the the promise of the Elements series for Indonesian studies at the end of this review. Davidson’s basic approach is to periodize Indonesian politics since democratization into three spells: Innovation (1998–2004), Stagnation (2004–14), and Polarization (2014–present). In describing each, he reviews the main political issues, economic developments, and what he calls “identity-based mobilizations” (6). As Davidson recognizes, this approach encourages him to focus on issues such as religious and ethnic conflict instead of things like law, globalization, or nationalist movements, but it is nevertheless an effective way to weave together discussions of political, economic, and social change over time. Following this periodization allows Davidson to show that Indonesian democracy—while faring much better than Indonesia’s Southeast Asian neighbors—is still “wobbly” (4), and that it is possible to see changes over time in Indonesian democracy since 1999. That conclusion is sensible and well-supported by his evidence. It corresponds to the first of what Davidson identifies as three arguments made throughout the book. His second and third arguments—that “democracy, and its related process of democratization, is the most appropriate overarching framework for studying Indonesia” (4) and that “the post-Soeharto period can be divided into three main periods” rather than conceptualized through “changes and continuities” from the New Order (6)—receive rather less explicit attention. It is not clear who the main interlocutors or detractors are for these two arguments. It stands to reason that those who emphasize factors other than democratization, or who do follow a changes-and-continuities approach, may just have different objectives in mind than Davidson does. The book’s contribution does not depend on those two arguments, although it might profitably be cited as advancing each of them. My own interest in the political economy of Indonesia’s transition and its immediate aftermath leads me to some quibbles in interpretation. Davidson’s description of the divide between the right and the left with regard to understanding the 1997–99 [End Page 137] Indonesian financial crisis (6) is provocative but too simplistic. Many conservative-leaning economists interpreted the Indonesian economy under Soeharto as nothing more than a mafia-like protection racket fundamentally concerned with “rent harvesting.”2 More progressive observers attribute the crisis to the panicked reactions of “capital controllers” in an era of reglobalized finance.3 The Indonesian financial crisis, as economic crises often do, made a mess of traditional ideological camps. Likewise, the discussion of how the International Monetary Fund drove post-crisis economic reform may be overstated (“The IMF, a US-controlled organization, used the crisis as a pretext to pry open what was only a partially protected economy” [15]). This discussion is certainly under-sourced. The statist flavor of economic nationalism runs deep in Indonesia’s political economy, which explains why so many of the IMF’s reforms proved so unpopular. But there is also a long history of powerful economic actors exploiting liberalizing reforms for their own interests, dating back to the earliest days of the New Order. It would be a shame if readers without a background in Indonesian political economy concluded that IMF measures were the main driver of Indonesia’s halting and uncertain economic reforms, rather than one of many forces shaping the political and economic environment of the early 2000s, one operating with real...

Political Economy of Cross-Border Income Shifting: A Protection Racket Approach

Multinational firms often shift their incomes to low-tax jurisdictions, thus robbing host states of tax revenue. I offer a new theory to explain why some firms do this while others do not. I argue that firms that are more vulnerable to government expropriation are, counterintuitively, less likely to shift income offshore, since complying fully with tax law gives the government a greater stake in their survival. Analyzing a registry-based panel data on multinational firms, their tax burdens, and a cross-sectional information of the firms’ connections to tax havens, l find that, other things equal, firms with more concentrated fixed assets are less likely to use havens. These results challenge existing theories of the political economy of development. Whereas the “Pillars of Prosperity” theory suggests that successful states simultaneously develop protection of property rights and fiscal capacity, my results show that perfect property rights protection can actually undermine the state’s ability to tax. In a world of frictionless international capital flows, some level of expropriation risk may be necessary to prevent a fiscal crisis due to evasion.