Crime and Justice, Volume 49 – Organizing Crime: Mafias, Markets, and Networks

For most Americans, The Godfather, The Sopranos, and the Cosa Nostra exemplify organised crime. In Asia, the term conjures up images of Japanese yakuza and Chinese triads; in Italy, the Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta; in Latin America, Mexican narco-gangs and Colombian drug cartels; in the Netherlands, transnational drug and human trafficking; and in Scandinavia, outlaw motorcycle gangs. Some but not all of those organisations are “mafias” with centuries-long histories, distinctive cultures, and complicated relationships with local communities and governments. Others are new, large but transitory, and with no purpose other than maximising profits from illegal markets.

Organised crime organisations have existed for centuries. Serious scholarly efforts to understand them, as opposed to journalistic or law enforcement perspectives, date back only a few decades. Authoritative overviews were, until very recently, impossible. Rigorous, analytically acute, and methodologically sophisticated literatures did not exist. They have begun to emerge and have developed in many countries, involving work in different languages and disciplines, and deploying a wide range of methods.

Organising Crime: Mafias, Markets, and Networks provides the most exhaustive overview ever published of knowledge about organised crime. It offers intensive accounts of American, Italian, and Dutch developments, covers both national mafias and transnational criminality, and delves in depth into gender, human capital, and money laundering issues. The writers are based in seven countries and, to a person, they are, or are among, the world’s most distinguished specialists in their subjects. At last, credible explanations and testable hypotheses are available concerning when, why, and under what circumstances mafias and other organised crime organisations come into being, what makes them distinctive, what they do and with what effects, and how to contain them.