State, Political Power and Criminality in Civil War: An Editorial Revisiting Old debates From Different angles

ABSTRACT

This special issue revisits and reframes the old, but active, debate on the relationship between criminality and civil war. It argues that the terms in which the debate is generally posed are still inadequate to address the complexities of this relationship, showing how criminalisation and de-criminalisation are deeply political and hotly contested processes.  The shifting movements towards the separation -or convergence- between criminality and politics are part of the processes of constitution of both political power and state. The articles in the issue flesh out the mechanisms and social dynamics through which this takes place.

KEYWORDS:

• Political power
• criminality
• conflict
• state
• criminalisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. From now on, ‘criminality’ should be understood as ‘economic criminality’.

2. Which in itself might deserve a separate critical consideration.

3. Not by chance, declaring that a group is ‘criminal’ is a typical performative instance of ‘doing things with words’ (Austin, 2020).

4. The link between politics and criminality, thus, is everything but new, as Kalyvas (2001) has highlighted so well.

5. Which highlights that democracy could also be depicted as a violent and criminal regime (the self-regarding government of the multitude).

6. Mandic established also a comparison with the Georgian case.

7. See also García and Espinosa (2013) who speak about a territorial institutional ghetto in Colombia.