Protection Rackets Research Articles

Catalytic protection racket

Catalytic protection racket

Human smuggling across Niger: state-sponsored protection rackets and contradictory security imperatives

AbstractIn recent years, Niger has gained prominence as a hub for the smuggling of migrants from West Africa to North Africa and Europe. Urged on by European concerns, Niamey has adopted repressive measures to contain such migrations in the region. These, however, have largely failed, and have yielded unintended and unexpected results, which challenge policy predictions. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the article suggests that contradictory security imperatives have brought about the de facto regularisation of human smuggling. As a result, protection rackets sponsored by the state through patronage networks have severely limited the impact of externally sponsored measures to counteract irregular migration.

Countering Protection Rackets Using Legal and Social Approaches: An Agent‐Based Test

Protection rackets cause economic and social damage across the world. States typically combat protection rackets using legal strategies that target the racketeers with legislation, strong sentencing, and increasing the presence and involvement of police officers. Nongovernmental organizations, conversely, focus on the rest of the population and counter protection rackets using a social approach. These organisations attempt to change the actions and social norms of community members with education, promotional campaigns, and discussions. We use an agent‐based model, which draws on established theories of protection rackets and combines features of sociological and economic perspectives to modelling social interactions, to test the effects of legal and social approaches. We find that a legal approach is a necessary component of a policy approach, that social only approaches should not be used because they lead to large increases in violence, and that a combination of the two works best, although even this must be used carefully.

Conclusion

Conclusion

A Hard-to- Escape Situation Informal Pacts, Kingpin Strategies, and Collective Violence in Mexico

Mexico has for an extended period been experiencing homicide rates above, or close to, epidemic levels. Instead of examining why formal institutional reform geared at strengthening democracy has not helped to foment peace and security, as most of the research on collective violence in Latin America and the Caribbean does, this paper focuses on the gap between formal and informal institutions, and continuities rather than points of rupture. I argue that in Mexico, there is a gap between formal institutions (which define how the country should be) and informal institutions (which constrain actual strategic choices). I apply a path-dependence approach to examine what factors have been reproducing collective violence over time, finding that the prevalence of protection rackets (operated by non-state actors at the subnational level) and the use of kingpin strategies (both by state and non-state actors) explain collective violence in the past but also in the present. In the past decades, informal pacts and kingpin strategies have changed in Mexico, but they have survived and adapted to the new formally democratic institutional setting. For the period 1989-2017, I identify three critical junctures that changed the rules of the game, four mechanisms of inertia, and two factors of lock-in that make it difficult to reduce collective violence.

The British Monopoly On The Surat Trade To The Middle East And The Indian Ship-Owning Merchants’ Struggle Against It: 1759–1800

AbstractBetween 1759 and 1800, Surat, still an important trade and financial centre, was under the ultimate rule of the East India Company. Although the EIC justified this as necessary for protecting Surat's inhabitants and, most particularly, the local merchant class, the Company failed not only to protect the Surat merchants against the depredations of Great Britain's European enemies, but also to safeguard the merchants from extortion by local EIC top officials. In fact, the latter imposed what was essentially a protection racket on trade from Surat to the Middle East. This article focuses on the Surat merchants’ long-drawn out and ultimately unsuccessful struggle against what, in the official documents, was dubbed the [British] monopoly of the trade to the “Gulphs”. The episode demonstrates two theses: the first is that the interests of the Surat merchants held little importance to the EIC or its officials, and the second is that, during the period under examination, no mutually beneficial partnership tied the British to the Surat merchants — rather, the relationship was one of naked exploitation by the former of the latter.

The United States and Israel

The United States and Israel

Protection Rackets and Party Machines

Control over means of violence and protection emerge as crucial in much research on corruption in non-South Asian contexts. In the Indian context, however, we still know little about the systems of organised violence that sustain the entanglement of crime, capital and democratic politics. This timely comparative ethnographic piece explores two different manifestations of what our informants identify as “Mafia Raj” (“rule by mafia”) across North India (Uttar Pradesh and Punjab). Drawing on analytical concepts developed in the literature on bossism and “mafias”, we explore protection and racketeering as central statecraft repertoires of muscular styles of governance in the region. We show how a predatory economy together with structures of inter- and intra-party political competition generate the demand for and the imposition of unofficial and illegal protection and shape different manifestations of Mafia Raj. In doing so, the paper aims to contribute to debates on the relationship between states and illegalities in and beyond South Asia.

Taxation, Stateness and Armed Groups: Public Authority and Resource Extraction in Eastern Congo

ABSTRACTThis contribution analyses the role of taxation in the constitution of authority in the conflict‐ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where a multitude of authorities alternately compete and collude over the right to extract resources. Taxation ranges from simple plunder, to protection rackets, to the material reciprocation of the recognition of rights. Focusing on the taxation practices of armed groups, the article argues that taxation is at the core of armed groups’ production of public authority and citizenship, and that their modes of taxation are based on long‐standing registers of authority and practices of rule that originate in the colonial era. In particular, the article shows that by appealing to both local customary and national forms of political community and citizenship, armed groups are able to assume public authority to tax civilians. However, their public authority may be undermined by their tendency to reproduce a historical pattern in which authorities forcefully impose a heavy tax burden, while providing limited public goods and services in return.

Extorted Life: Protection Rackets in Guatemala City

Extortion is the most common of crimes in Central America today and the most despised. As a growing criminal phenomenon, it exemplifies trends prevalent across post–Cold War Latin America as well as other parts of the world. In many societies, the “democratic wave” and the triumph of market fundamentalism has been accompanied by deepening uncertainty: the state has become criminal, criminals counterfeit the state. For those caught in the middle, distinguishing between predator and protector is often impossible. Proliferating protection rackets are both a symptom of and answer to collective anxieties over the terms of everyday survival and the difficulty of determining just who is in charge. This essay is an ethnography of extorted life, mapping the expanding geographies of extortion in postwar Guatemala to illuminate how this cold-blooded business organizes life at the most intimate of scales.

From Protected State to Protection Racket: Contextualising Divide and Rule in Bahrain

Bahrain’s Royal Family, the Al Khalifa, has long pursued a strategy of divide and rule in order to prevent the emergence of cross-opposition coalitions, while exacerbating the country’s sectarian divide has become a critical means of ensuring regime survival. This article examines the country’s twentieth century imperial and post-independence history through the framework of divide and rule theory, providing crucial context for current events in Bahrain. It demonstrates how a divide and rule strategy is structurally embedded within the ruling family’s mode of governance, and reveals how it continues to be employed as an effective means of maintaining absolute monarchy in Bahrain.

Pervasive, but not politicised: everyday violence, local rule and party popularity in a township in Cape Town

This paper explores relationships between political actors, local governance and violence in a community, through the case of security provision in the township of Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town. It traces the actions of key actors including SANCO, the City of Cape Town and ordinary residents in respect of crime, taxi violence, xenophobic attacks, protection rackets and service delivery protests. The extensive and varied nature of violence in Imizamo Yethu is related to uneven political legitmacy. Further, this weak governance is attributable to a lack of legitimacy of both the City of Cape Town and informal community leaders. The latter are take the form of the local branch of a civic association, the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) allied to the national ruling party, the Africa National Congress (ANC). In Imizamo Yethu, SANCO is weak and riven by factionalism, but the legitimacy of the ANC remains high and there is no violent contest for local leadership positions. Social cohesion in IY is in flux, and violence is alternately used to shore up particular notions of social cohesion; while in other examples violence erodes social cohesion. In short, inadequate state governance and informal rule co-exist with high levels of political support for the ANC and its allies, high levels of violence and uncertain implications for social cohesion. This account runs against three common key assumptions. The first is that, under conditions of weak rule, violence is primarily about contests over political power. The pervasiveness of violence by a variety of social actors in Imizamo Yethu, but not so much by SANCO or the ANC, challenges this assumption. The second is that the violence is constitutive of informal rule in such contexts. However, in Imizamo Yethu the importance of party identification and ability to extract resources from the local state are more important to effective local rule than violent capacities. Lastly, the case of IY illustrates that effective local rule is not necessarily an important condition of party legitimacy, which is rooted in larger dynamics of national and race politics. Indeed, such is the extent of political adherence , as opposed to social cohesion, that violence forms no part of competition within the ANC family for local office and political control.

Pervasive, but not politicised: everyday violence, local rule and party popularity in a township in Cape Town

This paper explores relationships between political actors, local governance and violence in a community, through the case of security provision in the township of Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town. It traces the actions of key actors including SANCO, the City of Cape Town and ordinary residents in respect of crime, taxi violence, xenophobic attacks, protection rackets and service delivery protests. The extensive and varied nature of violence in Imizamo Yethu is related to uneven political legitmacy. Further, this weak governance is attributable to a lack of legitimacy of both the City of Cape Town and informal community leaders. The latter are take the form of the local branch of a civic association, the South African National Civic Organisation (SANCO) allied to the national ruling party, the Africa National Congress (ANC). In Imizamo Yethu, SANCO is weak and riven by factionalism, but the legitimacy of the ANC remains high and there is no violent contest for local leadership positions. Social cohesion in IY is in flux, and violence is alternately used to shore up particular notions of social cohesion; while in other examples violence erodes social cohesion. In short, inadequate state governance and informal rule co-exist with high levels of political support for the ANC and its allies, high levels of violence and uncertain implications for social cohesion. This account runs against three common key assumptions. The first is that, under conditions of weak rule, violence is primarily about contests over political power. The pervasiveness of violence by a variety of social actors in Imizamo Yethu, but not so much by SANCO or the ANC, challenges this assumption. The second is that the violence is constitutive of informal rule in such contexts. However, in Imizamo Yethu the importance of party identification and ability to extract resources from the local state are more important to effective local rule than violent capacities. Lastly, the case of IY illustrates that effective local rule is not necessarily an important condition of party legitimacy, which is rooted in larger dynamics of national and race politics. Indeed, such is the extent of political adherence , as opposed to social cohesion, that violence forms no part of competition within the ANC family for local office and political control.

Simulating protection rackets: a case study of the Sicilian Mafia

Protection racketeering groups are powerful, deeply entrenched in multiple societies across the globe, and they harm the societies and economies in which they operate in multiple ways. These reasons make their dynamics important to understand and an objective of both scientific and application-oriented interest. Legal and social norm-based approaches arguably play significant roles in influencing protection racket dynamics. We propose an agent-based simulation model, the Palermo Scenario, to enrich our understanding of these influences and to test the effect of different policies on protection racket dynamics. Our model integrates the legal and the social norm-based approaches and uses a complex normative agent architecture that enables the analysis of both agents' behaviours and mental normative representations driving behaviour. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model and the benefits of using this complex normative architecture through a case study of the Sicilian Mafia.

Witnessing the protection racket: Rethinking justice in/of wars through gender lenses

Using as a starting point both feminist critiques of just war theorizing and feminist reconstructions of traditional theoretical approaches to the concept, causes and consequences of war(s), this article looks to outline a feminist approach to re-theorizing war ethics that explicitly accounts for and rejects the current gender biases it creates and reifies. It begins by suggesting that the just war tradition is conceptually and empirically inseparable from gendered notions of warfare, which are gender security and to securitize gender. Therefore, it suggests, war ethics through gender lenses need to be rebuilt from the ground up, paying attention to the heretofore gendered nature not only of war ethics, but also of war justificatory narratives, war practices and war experiences.The article suggests a dialectical hermeneutic framework for feminist war ethics as a basis for theorizing forward from the longstanding feminist recognition that the very concept of warfare is gendered, relying on Robin Schott’s (2008) work on witness as a theoretical basis. After outlining this approach generally, the article concludes by sketching out an example of the potential for a feminist approach to war ethics in action, examining the use whole-body image scanners in airport security assemblages.

The Camorra and protection rackets: the cost to business

Based on the observations from the judicial and investigative evidence provided by prosecutors in Camorra areas in Italy, this investigation provides an estimate of the economic impact of extortion racket to businesses. In particular, the estimates refer to the total and average withdrawal of monetary amounts from the businesses victimised by Camorra clans. Further insights are provided in terms of economic activities mostly victimised, and specifically the construction sector, which is subject to a different type of extortion racket.

Ian Douglas Wilson. The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street Politics. Oxon, NY: Routledge, 2015, xxii+198p.

The Politics of Protection Rackets in Post-New Order Indonesia: Coercive Capital, Authority and Street PoliticsIAN DOUGLAS WILSONOxon, NY: Routledge, 2015, xxii+198p.Seventeen years have passed since fall of Suharto's New Order regime. Indonesia's reformasi has since been lauded successful case of democratization. Despite consolidation of institutional democracy, however, some critics have argued that conventional system of power relations established by end of New Order still persists, while others have argued that distribution of power and material resources is still under strong influence of small number of very wealthy individuals (Ford and Pepinsky 2014). By giving clear account of changing condition regarding politics of and mass organizations in Jakarta, this book illustrates that principle of local politics fundamentally altered after end of authoritarian regime.The originality of this study is twofold: it sees Jakarta site of local politics rather than center of national politics; it also sheds lights on positive side of mass mobilization. Studies on mass mobilization in decentralizing Indonesia have been predominantly about local politics of regions outside Jakarta, if not about politics at national level. More importantly, they have disregarded potential for mass organizations to be advocates on issues of immediate consequence to their members and neighborhoods in which they live (p. 94).In Chapter 1, Protection, Violence and State, author sets up theoretical framework for his study. Following Charles Tilly, author starts by denying state's complete monopoly over control of coercive force within its territory. However, while Tilly identifies state an entity controlling principle means of coercion within given territory (Tilly 1975, 62), Wilson sees state, with Joel Migdal, field of power marked by use and threat of violence (Migdal 2001, 15) and aim of his study identifying dynamics and contradictions of practices and strategies of parts making up this 'field of power' (ibid., 16). Thus, boundary between state and non-state actors is essentially blurred. Furthermore, Wilson cites criminologist Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt, who differs from Tilly in seeing state as product of particular historical period and stage of state-formation (p. 10) in order to conceptualize relation between regimes and of rackets protection racket regimes. These regimes are formed by state and/or non-state elites in order to preserve their through violent exclusion of large groups in society that experience condition of substantial social disparities (Schulte-Bockholt 2006, 35). But unlike Schulte-Bockholt, who presumes that power elites would simply subsume sub-hegemonic groups into dominating class across conventional class lines both systematically and ideologically (pp. 8-9), Wilson draws different picture. For mass organizations in post-New Order Jakarta are largely untethered from direct control of military or police, where the racket relationship of domination operates in peculiar brand of populist racketeering (p. 172).In Chapter 2, Reconfigured Rackets: Continuity, Change and Consolidation, author outlines how gangs and mass organizations adapted to post-New Order social environment and how they transformed themselves from racketeers into professional providers. Demographic of poor due to massive immigration and their spatial segregation from upper-middle class due to growing number of enclave residences characterize urban space of Jakarta. These conditions gave rise to insecurity and feeling of deprivation among lower middle-class population in city, including Betawi. On top of this situation was nation-wide political trend of democratization and decentralization, which gave rise to a particular kind of populist political agency of urban poor, who claim to have grass-roots relations with urban underclass and to represent such people (p. …

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

FFminisme Et Droit International : Le FFminisme De Gouvernance LLLpreuve Du FFminisme Critique (Feminism and International Law: 'Governance Feminism' Put to the Test of 'Critical Feminism')

Drowning out the protection racket: partner manipulation or drought can strengthen ant-plant mutualism.

Two recent reports discuss interactions between plants and ants that defend them from herbivores. Acacia trees provide their ant bodyguards with a diet that reduces their ability to benefit from alternate hosts. Provisioning of ants by Cordia trees during drought may buy insurance against extreme defoliation events, not just average-year benefits.

From business to war: Causes of transitional violence by the Mexican drug cartels

From business to war: Although illicit markets are generally peaceful, at times they burst into massive transitional violence. One example for such an upsurge in violence is Mexico where the drug cartels are engaged in a bloody war. The Mexican case reveals that two interrelated factors can incite transitional illegal violence. First, market changes that close or open up business opportunities can lead to violent criminal competition. Second, political changes can cause or increase criminal violence. When collusive state-crime relations erode and the state increases law enforcement against criminal groups, they are likely to fight back. Both factors are tightly connected: criminal competition may erode protection rackets and incite harsher law enforcement. Law enforcement in turn may lead to the fragmentation of crime groups and cause more violent competition. Massive criminal violence is fed by further factors such as the easy availability of both weapons and specialists in violence and the displacement effect of intensive law enforcement in regions characterized by weak state structures.