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The political philosophers who taught me a generation ago were quite clear that whatever was to be called ‘political’ must have something to do with the State: if phrases like ‘University politics’ or ‘Church politics’ were used, then they meant that these institutions were playing a part in State politics: otherwise the phrases were simply metaphors. But political structures can be recognized at all levels and in all kinds of activities and can, when appropriate, be compared with one another.

Bailey 2001 [1969], 12

Unlike Frederick Bailey, the political theorists who taught me (in the early 1980s in Italy) were well aware that politics can have a life of its own, quite distinct from the ‘state’. Moving from ideas originally proposed by scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Max Weber and Carl Schmitt, and apparently, though not often explicitly, backed by scientists operating in the life sciences (e.g., Wilson 1975; de Waal 2007 [1982]), they were not afraid to recognize ‘political structures … at all levels and in all kinds of activities’ (to follow the words of Bailey). The so-called ‘mafia’ could easily fit these ideas. In the case of Mosca, this fitness was probably not incidental. As a Sicilian, Mosca was well aware of the limits of the state in monopolizing politics, even though, as a liberal scholar educated in law and committed to national unity, this awareness was not something he could so explicitly and publicly extend to the mafia. In fact, Mosca wrote intensively about the mafia, but never explicitly about it being a ‘political structure’. Weber came closer to this vision, referring to the camorra and the mafia as cases of ‘intermittent financing of political groups’ (1978 [1922], 195) – but it is far from clear whether he considered camorra and mafia as political groups in themselves or as channels for financing more established and acknowledged political groups. Schmitt never wrote a line about the mafia, but his seminal and much debated ‘concept of the political’ is capable of accommodating almost anything that might generate a certain degree of intensity in the relations among friends and enemies – a suggestion that could inspire a whole research programme about all those ‘social unities’ that are commonly labelled as ‘criminal organizations’, including not only mafias but also terrorist groups and even hybrid formations claiming to be states, such as ISIS.

None of these research lines has been systematically pursued in mafia studies – a few attempts moving along these lines notwithstanding (e.g., Sabetti 1984; Calise 1988; Catanzaro 1992 [1988]; Santino 1994; Schneider and Schneider 2004; Collins 2011). In mafia studies, the assumption of an almost perfect and normatively backed equivalence between ‘state’ and politics has been dominant, and only rarely called into question. It is as if social scientists, when studying mafias, tend to believe in states and their claims much more than when they are studying states as such. In some way, this may be considered an indication of the success of criminology, the discipline that, in the words of an influential sociologist of deviance, ‘has managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state’ (Cohen 1996, 4). Suspended between the mafia and the state, mafia scholars have little doubt about where to go. If mafia has to do with politics, says the common wisdom, this is only because it also has to do with the state – as an object of law enforcement and a potentially disruptive force within the state (with mafia being responsible for criminal activities such as corruption, collusion and even violence against representatives of the state). Mafias may at best have ‘policies’, but not ‘politics’ – because ‘politics’ is another thing. Or better: should be another thing.

The sense in which politics is intended in this book is rather different. Following a few established, albeit marginalized in mafia studies, traditions in political philosophy and anthropology (e.g., Leach 1954; Bailey 1971, 2001 [1969]; Geertz 1963; Freund 1965; Swartz et al. 1966; Swartz 1969; Thompson 1975; Scott 1985; Derrida 1988; Masters 1989; Rancière 1998), politics is here conceived of as different from the ‘state’. The concept of politics is wider than the concept of the state, and politics as a sphere of human action is larger than what the state, as a historically grounded institution, comprises. Politics exists before, besides and beyond the state. It is probably true that the state is the main protagonist in the political life of modern times, even though there are clues that this is not always the case and that states are losing their authority, and that other forms of political organization do exist beside, behind and sometimes within the state (e.g., Skalnik 2004). But the state has never, in fact, managed to exhaust the sphere of politics. Thinking of ‘mafia politics’, both meanings of politics suggested by Bailey should therefore be included: that is, we should consider mafia as both an institution playing a part in state politics and as a political structure on its own, independently from any assumptions we may have about the ‘state’. As the first meaning is better known, the main focus of this book is on the second meaning.

There are a few expressions in contemporary research that resonate with ‘mafia politics’, the term I have chosen for the title of this book. The first that comes to mind is possibly Achille Mbembe’s (2003) notion of ‘necropolitics’. For Mbembe, the creation of the state’s Other as a permanent enemy to be killed, and the consequent management and disposition of dead (and disappeared) bodies under state auspices, illustrates the ‘necropolitics’ at the heart of contemporary governance. Mbembe (2003, 13) explicitly opposes this politics to mainstream political theorists’ notions of liberal democracies based on the collective agreements of self-aware, autonomous citizens. This approach could help us get at what Veena Das and Deborah Poole (2004, 6) have referred to as ‘the secret life of the state’ existing behind the official rhetoric of centralized bureaucratic rationality and the rule of law. Undoubtedly, mafia pertains to a zone of social life where the dead are very present – and not only mass media but also art photography on the mafia has directed their focus precisely to this area.

However, for all its fascination and cognitive appeal, the notion of ‘necropolitics’ covers only one region, and probably not the largest, of what I mean by ‘mafia politics’, lacking not only any precise institutional reference, but missing the specific link to the protection of life that is at the core of mafia politics – and not bare life (as Agamben would call it, the simple life of those who are struggling for survival) but political life, as bìos (Agamben 1998). In this sense, ‘mafia politics’ could be closer to another proposed term, ‘gastro-politics’ (Appadurai 1981), insofar as it would direct our attention to the ways in which politics works as a vital resource, grounded in human appetites and longing for a safe existence. ‘By gastro-politics’, wrote Appadurai, ‘I mean conflict or competition over specific cultural or economic resources as it emerges in social transactions around food. In this sense, gastro-politics is a common feature of many cultures’ (1981, 495). Clearly, also in this case, the focus is more on materiality, albeit semiotically dense, than on social relationships and their management. Mafia politics is radically about the latter.¹

Research on the mafia is very insidious – because ‘mafia’ is an insidious reality. It is something that exists, so it is a reality: this book never claims the contrary. But the reality of this ‘reality’ is a complex one: it is multilayered, multivocal, with blurred boundaries with respect to other social realities. This is not uncommon in research on ‘social things’ (e.g., Lemert 1997). In the case of the mafia, however, this is the absolutely normal situation: everything can be read differently, everything could be an object of discussion, everything seems to change according to the perspective from which it is seen. Not surprisingly, the mafia may be as difficult to study as the state – and I would like to recall here the words of Philip Abrams:

We have come to take the state for granted as an object of political practice and political analysis while remaining quite spectacularly unclear as to what the state is … the state, conceived of as a substantial entity separate from society has proved a remarkably elusive object of analysis … the difficulty of studying the state can be seen as in part a result of the nature of the state, but in an equally large part must be seen as a result of the predispositions of its students. (1988, 59, 61–2)

The difficulties in studying the state are nowhere more evident than when dealing with crime. The nexus of state and crime is far from exceptional. The very existence of crime and criminals is obviously a matter of state authority and state laws (e.g., Briquet and Favarel–Garrigues 2010). But the links between crime and state are not limited to official penalties, courts, police, prisons and the like. It seems there are strong tendencies for states to engage directly in criminal activities or to enter the world of crime in spite of itself, or at least of its official claims. You do not need to look to the distant past or very far away to see these tendencies at work. In the Middle East, organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq provide local governance while participating in a range of offshore illicit activities and organizing terrorist activities (e.g., Haidar 2019). Armed groups in Afghanistan, Colombia and Mali have been engaged in drug trafficking, often with the connivance, if not outright participation, of state agencies (e.g., McCoy 2003). In Somalia, organized piracy emerged a decade ago as a central factor in the country’s political economy – and its complex politics and long-running civil war (Shortland and Varese 2016). In the Sahel and North Africa, militant, terrorist and militia fortunes have been tied to dynamics in organized hostage markets and in drug, oil and cigarette smuggling. In Central Africa, the traffic in diamonds and wildlife is well established (Bayart et al. 1999). In the Balkans and Turkey, cigarette smuggling, organ trafficking, human trafficking and trade in stolen cars have all been factors in the region’s recent past and post-war politics (cf. Cockayne 2016; see also Chambliss 1989; Heyman 1999; Nordstrom 2007; Wilson 2009; Chambliss et al. 2010).

To investigate the political nature of mafias is strategic to answering a question many people are asking nowadays: how is the convergence between mafias and states, which is happening in every corner of the world right before our eyes, possible? How can it be that risks of ‘mafia states’ are emerging worldwide? The answer given in this book is simple: because mafias and states share exactly the same nature, because they are two institutional forms of political life, because even if they are almost opposites, they are arranged in such a way as to make one the perfect counterpart of the other. Like yin and yang, they are mutually reinforcing and complementary.

This book has been a long time in the making. In a way, it started as a tesi di laurea (Master’s thesis) in 1988 in political science, which developed into a book twenty years later (Santoro 2007). In the meantime, I have worked on many other topics – such as the social history of legal professions, the sociology of artistic production and cultural consecration, the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, the Chicago School of sociology, the international circulation of ideas – all of which have helped me to refine my vision of the mafia by exposing me to literature that is not typically used by mafia scholars. The 2007 book is the most immediate antecedent to this one – the latter sharing some arguments of the former but adding many new insights mainly drawn from research programmes I was not aware of back then (in part because they were not yet available), such as the debate on Southern Theory and alternative traditions in social theory (Reed-Danahay 1995; Alatas 2006a, 2014; Connell 2007; Patel 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) and the new historiography of the state (Ruggie 1993; Spruyt 1994; Thompson 1994; see also van der Pijl 2007).

In its main thesis, this book joins a series of other books that are contributing from different perspectives and intellectual traditions to develop what I would call a political theory of the mafia – something nobody yet seems ready to openly propose as such, but whose seeds have been sown in the past few decades by many scholars, including two giants in the historical social sciences: Eric Hobsbawm (1959) and Charles Tilly (1985). What a (sociologically grounded and historically sensitive) political theory of the mafia might look like is the question that inspired and drove the writing of this book.