The Mafia,the market and the state in Italy and Russia

Pino Arlacchi (1983) La mafia imprenditrice (Bologna: II Mulino); translated by Martin Ryle as Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1986), $13.95, ISBN 0‐86091‐892‐0.

Raimondo Catanzaro (1988) II delitto come impresa: storia sociale della mafia (Padua: Liviana Editrice); translated by Raymond Rosenthal as Men of Respecc: A Social History of the Sicilian Mafia (New York: Free Press, 1992), $22.95, hardback, ISBN 0‐02‐905325‐0.

Diego Gambetta (1992) La mafia siciliana: Una industria della protezione privata (Turin: Einaudi revised paperback edn, 1994); translated as The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), $39.95 hardback, ISBN 0‐674‐80741‐3.

Salvatore Lupo (1993) Storia della mafia dalle origini ai giorni nostri (Rome: Donzelli Editore).

Alexander Stille (1995) Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (New York: Pantheon), ISBN 0679425799.

Stephen Handelman (1995) Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), $27.50, hardback, ISBN 0‐300‐06352‐0.

Robert Putnam (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), $39.95, hardback, $14.95, paperback, ISBN 0‐691‐03738‐8.     

Ecology,warfare, and politics in the New Guinea highlands

Mervyn Meggitt. Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1977. xii + 223 pp. Tables, figures, glossary, and index. $4.95, paper.     

An unsettling integration: Immigrant lives and work in Palermo

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the most enduring political hero of nineteenth‐century Italy. His political image was inspired by both the romantic movement and religion and, in turn, inspired a new kind of charismatic popular politics. The first part of this article explores the sources and assesses the impact of the cult of Garibaldi during the Risorgimento. The second part examines the use made of Garibaldi's image after Italian unification and, especially, after his death. It finds that government attempts to glorify Garibaldi were relatively unsuccessful while the parallel, republican cult of Garibaldi had a considerable impact. Thus, Garibaldi's extraordinary popularity highlighted the failed official ‘nationalization’ of Italians. At the same time, support for Garibaldi points to the emergence of an alternative sense of Italian national identity     

Fighting for the Afterlife: Spiritists, Catholics, and Popular Religion in Nineteenth-Century France

This article examines the position of nineteenth-century French spiritism in relation to the Catholic Church. Spiritism offered an alternative "religion" to French Catholics dissatisfied with the church's traditionalism in a modernizing world. I begin by describing the spiritists' position on Catholic dogma and the movement's place as an urban popular religion. Spiritist critiques of heaven and hell incorporated liberal and republican values, thus making it appealing to these groups who were often hostile to the church. I move next to conflicts between the adversaries. Spiritists, unfettered by dogma or even logic in some cases, freely incorporated the supernatural into the nineteenth-century acceptance of Enlightenment values such as reason and science. The church, unable to deny the reality of supernatural phenomena claimed by the spiritists, limited itself to asserting the devil's hand in these phenomena. It thus could not fully address the challenge of spiritism. Spiritism as a popular religion complicates the assumption by many folklorists regarding the disappearance of popular beliefs in the face of the modern. The article concludes with a call to modify these theories in order to understand an evolving, often urban, popular culture which integrated "tradition" and "modernity" and continually created new forms of the marvellous.     

Mafia doesn't live here anymore: Antimafia policies and housing prices

It is well known that the value of a house depends both on the physical characteristics and on some features of the neighborhood in which it is located. If so, organized-crime activities can significantly affect urban real estate values. Antimafia policies, in turn, can be intended as a tool to influence those external features. This paper compares the effects on real estate values of the two main antimafia policies implemented in Italy since the 1990s at the municipal level. While we do not find any significant effect of dismissal policies on house prices, we find a statistically significant effect of reassignment policies depending on the specific destination of confiscated property.     

Counselling in rural Scotland: care,proximity and trust

People living in small rural communities tend to interact with each other in multiple aspects of their lives and are generally less anonymous to one another than those living in urban places. This density of social connectedness tends to militate against the boundaries normally associated with professionalised forms of care. This article explores how these tensions are negotiated by people who have developed local counselling services in two rural areas in Scotland. Counselling is becoming increasingly widely used as a response to a variety of forms of distress and is argued to constitute a modern urban and feminised form of care. However, notwithstanding its urban origins and associations, people in some rural places in Scotland have successfully arranged for training to be delivered locally to men as well as women. Nevertheless they recognise that for many rural residents, counselling continues to be alien and viewed with suspicion. They describe how they protect the identities of service-users using locational and social network strategies. They also discuss the issues that flow from the challenges of providing well-boundaried relationships. In so doing they point to an inverse relationship between social proximity and trust, thereby supplementing existing accounts of the disadvantages of social proximity in rural places.     

Anxiety geopolitics: Hybrid warfare,civilisational geopolitics,and the Janus-faced politics of anxiety

Working at the intersection of political geography and international relations, this article does two things. First, it theorises the relationship between geopolitics and anxiety. Second, it uses this conceptual lens to analyse and critique the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’. The conceptual part draws on Lacanian political theory and contributes to critical geopolitics, ontological security studies, and the literature on politics of anxiety. It is built around the notion of anxiety geopolitics, which denotes a discourse that promises to deal with social anxiety by providing geopolitical fixes to it, yet also ultimately fails in doing so. We then move to argue that ‘hybrid warfare’ is a prime case of such discourse. Using examples from the Czech Republic, we show how the discourse of ‘hybrid warfare’ successfully connects different sorts of anxieties together and creates a sense of ontological security by linking them to familiar East/West civilisational geopolitics that points to Russia as the ultimate culprit. Yet, at the same time, the discourse simultaneously subverts itself by portraying ‘hybrid threats’ as too insidious, invisible and constantly shifting to be ever possibly durably resolved. We conclude that this makes ‘hybrid warfare’ self-defeating, normatively problematic, and strategically impractical.     

Drones: disembodied aerial warfare and the unarticulated threat

The Obama administration's controversial use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen has made the subject a hot topic of political and academic discourse. While most of this debate has focused so far on the legal, ethical and prudential use of large armed aerial vehicles, this article seeks to address the potential wider impact of this new technological innovation. The article argues that drones constitute a new and disruptive technology not just in the way that they have been used to enable a new form of counterterrorism. Instead, it argues that drones pose a new form of terrorist threat against the West which is at present under‐analysed, unarticulated and underestimated. Part of the reason for this underestimation is the failure to appreciate the scale and scope of drone use for commercial purposes which is about to unfold. Technological innovation now means that drones will be capable of many jobs currently performed by small planes and helicopters, but more cheaply and easily—in addition to many other new applications. The proliferation of this cheap and easily available technology will make its application for terrorist use easy to achieve and difficult to counter. The ability of drones to penetrate traditional defences and established conceptions of what constitutes a plausible threat is a challenge which so far has gone unheeded. This article seeks to challenge that complacency.     

Proximity,trust and morality in networks

Network interaction is embedded in social settings, which allows for the development of trust. Trust is supposed to be an efficient functional equivalent of contracts, guarantees, insurances, safeguards, etc. Trust between actors reduces transaction costs. However, trust cannot be introduced and enforced within interaction relationships. It is argued that trust is more likely to occur and to be prevalent when actors have the spatial capability for personal, direct interaction. Thus, proximity and trust are supposed to be positively related to each other. Proximity is strongly interrelated with embeddedness. In the discussion about morality in organisations, there is an assumption we referred to as the 'moral spill-over effect': it is impossible, it is said, to restrict moral competencies and moral behaviour to one particular situation, environment, or topic. However, we argue that, even though trust is a term that is described in moral theory, trust and morality are not necessarily positively correlated. This means that even if embeddedness and proximity in a network lead to an increase of trust between network partners, it does not necessarily produce moral spill-over effects. Thus, proximity and morality do not necessarily have to be positively correlated with each other. The influence of proximity on morality can be positive or negative, depending on the social surrounding in which network collaboration is embedded.     

Evolutionary theory and group selection: the question of warfare

Evolutionary anthropology has focused on the origins of war, or rather ethnocentricity, because it epitomizes the problem of group selection, and because war may itself have been the main agent of group selection. The neo-Darwinian synthesis in biology has explained how ethnocentricity might evolve by group selection, and the distinction between evoked culture and adopted culture, suggested by the emerging synthesis in evolutionary psychology, has explained how it might be transmitted. Ethnocentric mechanisms could have evolved by genetic selection in ancestral hominids, or through the interaction of genetic and cultural selection in modern humans, or both. The existence of similar behaviors in chimpanzees and the parallel development of early human societies around the globe are arguments for such inherited mechanisms. There may have been some adaptive breakthroughs in purely cultural evolution, but this process does not seem likely to produce long-term Darwinian adaptations because of the prolificity of cultural traits. Warfare may once have been a major agent of group selection, but the rates of extinction among human groups are so slow as to render this improbable since the rise of state-level societies, whose warfare tends to become a cyclical balance-of-power situation. Perhaps the most serious implication of current evolutionary thought is that the individualistic model of culture common in the social sciences and humanities is outmoded, and should be replaced by a new model that recognizes the organismic nature of human societies.     

Ordering without bordering: drones,the unbordering of late modern warfare and ontological insecurity

ABSTRACT

Borders – both physical and otherwise – are seen to be on the rise, but in late modern warfare, a complex process of unbordering can be observed in drone warfare. Targeted killings through drone strikes have changed the battlespace, made physical occupation unnecessary and rendered the Westphalian border as contingent and arbitrary. Furthermore, drones perform a complex form of ordering without borders in unruly spaces imbued with uncertainty, violence and danger. This article examines the intersection of bordering, drones and ontological security through the CIA-led U.S. drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. It examines the relationship between drone warfare and ontological security, specifically the effects produced by postcolonial unbordering and ordering. For the liberal state, drones provide a sense of ontological security and cohere with liberal values because they are deemed precise and ethical weapons that avoid collateral damage and protect military personnel, without the costs of occupation. Yet drone strikes create deep insecurity within postcolonial borderspaces, impacting communities already subject to multiple forms and legacies of power and control. This article argues that drone warfare has complex implications for bordering/unbordering practices in late modern warfare as well as hierarchical ontological insecurity in postcolonial and liberal subjects.