Gangster States

The author draws on behavioral ecology to predict the evolution of organized crime in unregulated systems of exchange and the further development of racketeer economies into unstable kleptocratic states. The result is a new model that explains the expansion and contraction of political-economic complexity in prehistoric and contemporary societies.

Hirschfeld has produced a gem of a work that is both multidisciplinary in its approach and intellectually seductive. Within the context of traditional organized crime studies, its amoral analytics may be viewed as highly disruptivealmost hereticalin nature. Contrarian and well executed works such as this should be greatly valued for their 'out of the box' perspectives and ability to shake up what can at times become an insular and dogmatic discipline. (Robert J. Bunker, Trends in Organized Crime, June, 2016)

"This innovative and engaging book provides ananthropologist's assessment of some of the problems besetting much of the developing world." - Robert I. Rotberg, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2015, 49(6)

Autorentext

Katherine Hirschfeld is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, USA. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2001. Her research interests include the political economy of health, disease ecology and post-Soviet transitions. Among her previous publications figures the monograph Health, Politics and Revolution in Cuba since 1898 (2007).

Inhalt

1. Introduction 1.1 Secret Vices 1.2 What is Organized Crime? 1.3 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 1.4 Case Study: Post-Soviet Russia 1.5 Gangs as Primitive States 1.6 Collapse and Regeneration 1.7 Darwinian Political Economy 2. What is Organized Crime? 2.1 Formal Verses Informal Economies 2.2 Organized Crime as Racketeering 2.3 Descriptive Vignette: Camorra 2.4 The Organization of Crime 2.5 Racketeering in Prison Economies 2.6 The Organization of a Stateless Campus Economy 2.7 Labor Rackets 2.8 Gambling Rackets 2.9 Prohibition 3. Failing Economics 3.1 Contaminated Markets 3.2 The Cold War in Economic Thinking 3.3 The Road to Friedmanistan 3.4 Experimental Vignette: The Other Invisible Hand 4. The Evolution of Racketeering 4.1 Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Ecology 4.2 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 4.3 Cheating and Systemic Complexity 4.4 Racketeering as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy 4.5 ESS Thinking: Farming and Raiding 4.6 From Raiding to Protection Rackets 4.7 Supply and Demand 4.8 The Geography of Protection 4.9 Narrative Vignette: Raiding and Trading on the Steppes 5. Organized Crime and Kleptocracy 5.1 From Gangs to Primitive States 5.2 The Underworld as Prehistory 5.3 Territoriality, Leadership, Violence 5.4 Prehistoric Gangster-States 5.5 Early European Gangster-States 5.6 Mafia Branding: The Exquisite Corpse 5.7 Narrative Vignette: Under the Cartels 5.8 The Gangsterization of Democracy 5.9 Scenes from a Kleptocracy 5.10 Cuba Case Study 5.11 Comparative Vignettes 5.12 Hispañola 5.13 Haiti 5.14 Zaire 5.15. Post-Soviet Gangster-States 5.16 Narrative Vignette: After the USSR 5.17 Post Script: American Exceptionalism? 6. Things Fall Apart...and Rebuild 6.1 Collapse as Conundrum 6.2 Progress and Underdevelopment 6.3 The State as Exaptation 6.4 Secondary State Formation in Prehistory 6.5 Collapse and Regeneration 6.6 Grey Zones and Demapping 6.7 Yugoslavia/Bosnia 6.8 USSR/Moldova/Transnistria 7. Darwinian Political Economy 7.1 Research Redux 7.2 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 7.3 Darwinian Political Economy