School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses

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    Crime or governance?: challenging the modern discourse on the (il)legitimacy of organised crime
    Aberdeen, Tammy Lee ( 2011)
    Authors in the state failure school of thought in the literature on organised crime routinely fail to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in weak states. This is in spite of providing evidence that organised crime often performs functions similar to that of the state. The unwillingness of authors in the state failure school of thought to acknowledge the potential legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance results from their use of a state-centric modernist discourse to frame the issue. This discourse routinely privileges the state’s claim to the monopoly on the use of violence and concomitant right of extraction at the expense of other social groups, including organised crime, even in weak states. This thesis challenges the dominant discourse in the state failure school by arguing that organised crime can be a legitimate form of governance in weak states when it exists in some way as a functional equivalent of the state. To test this claim, the thesis uses a historical-sociological approach to state formation and legitimacy to compare the supply of protection by the medieval state with that by contemporary criminal protection rackets in post-Communist Russia and Bulgaria in the 1990s. The results of a focused comparison between Russian and Bulgarian criminal protection rackets indicate that the legitimacy of organised crime as a form of governance in contemporary weak states is contingent on its ability to provide protection to certain social groups in the absence of effective state forms of governance.