Machine generated contents note: -- 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 HispanĚola -- 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.
Summary:
"Gangsterism, extortion and racketeering are currently viewed as deviant, pathological behaviors that are disconnected from formal political and economic structures, and often excluded from analysis in the fields of political science and economics. A critical reconsideration of organized crime reveals that the evolution of racketeering in systems of exchange should be understood as a natural phenomenon that can be predicted with tools from behavioral ecology originally developed to model the dynamics of predator-prey relations. These models predict the conditions under which unregulated markets evolve into hierarchical criminal syndicates, and how established organized crime groups expand and intrude into formal systems of government, creating chimeric 'gangster-states'. This book outlines the parameters of this process, and uses archival research to explore case studies of organized crime and kleptocratic state formation. A final section proposes redefining state formation as part of a longitudinal cycle of political-economic evolution that includes phases of racketeering, instability, collapse and regeneration"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.