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

1. Setting the boundaries for this special issue

How and in which sense contemporary civil wars can be deemed political and/or criminal? A standard answer of sorts to this question, has become widely predominant within some literatures in the last decades. Politics is about public affairs. Economic criminality – that is, the set of illegal activities oriented towards the obtaining of material advantages – is all about self-regarding concerns.¹ Its motivational content is greed. Thus, criminality is intrinsically non-political, illegitimate and violent. Political warriors have an ideology, criminals instead only have appetites. If politics and criminality have merged in contemporary civil wars, this is an eloquent symptom about their loss of political content (see, for example, Collier and Hoeffler 2004). War and insurgency became simply a criminal activity (Collier 2000).

There is much to say in favour of trying to understand politics and criminality as substantially different domains of human activity. For one, doing so is quite intuitive. The difference appears at the level of ideal-types, but also in the operational everyday life of both politicians and criminals. As argued by Machuca in this issue, political rebels, for example, have for decades made efforts to establish themselves as a category clearly distinct from economic criminality; states, and sometimes economic criminals themselves, have tried to go in the opposite direction. All this has clear and immediate logistical implications that can be observed in different contexts and historical trajectories. During the Mexican revolution, for example, Zapata made conscious efforts to prevent being tagged as a bandit (Womack 1968); the same phenomenon can be found during the formative stages of the Colombian FARC-EP (Trujillo 2015). In prisons, rebels organise their own modus operandi and create their separate spaces and time regulations, which ostensibly separate them from the lumpenproletariat, a good but by no means unique example of this being the incredible build-up of the Shining Path in the Peruvian jails or the Irish republicans in Ireland’s and UK’s prisons (McKeown 2001, Pinedo 2020).

Furthermore, some mechanisms have been identified that indeed tend to ‘separate the grain from the chaff’ regarding the motivational content underlying organised violence. Weinstein (2006), for example, claimed that different groups attract different types of people, offering cues – through incentives and public signals – that allow people to self-select in the correct type of group according to their characteristics and proclivities. All in all, as Gutiérrez and Ciro discuss in this issue, frequently ‘politicians’ and ‘(economic) criminals’ can be told apart – at least if the historical trajectory and the context in which they operate is taken into account.

The problems really start when it is assumed that insurgency, criminality and statehood are three neatly separated categories, without connecting points, which exclude each other. If you are a criminal, then you cannot represent genuine grievances and vice versa. If you are a criminal, then you are an enemy of the state and of state-building. If you are political, then you should not engage in criminal or illegal activities. And so on. This deeply a-historical perspective has been presented both as an empirical factoid (the underlying motivation of rebellion is outright criminal, i.e., Collier 2000) and as a conceptual perspective (thus, as a set of assumptions).

The empirical claim is now everything but dead, especially after Collier and co-authors retreated from their core positions (Collier et al. 2009). The conceptual perspective, however, is still alive and kicking (e.g., Marks 2017), at least partially, despite two fundamental highlights in the relevant literatures. Firstly, the ‘economicistic paradigm’ fell into ‘distress’ (Ron 2005) after being criticised on several accounts (starting by poor indicators and concepts, awkward assumptions, dubious inferences and glaring blind spots; see, for example, Cramer 2002, Gutiérrez-Sanín 2004, Ross 2004, Cramer and Richards 2011). Secondly, the long and strong tradition of analysing violence and criminality as social processes has made a strong come-back, in the measure that rational-choice perspectives and methodologies faced increasing difficulties and push-back. Indeed, Heyman (1999) already warned about the ‘stultifying’ assumption that there was a neat separating line between criminality and the state. Duyvesteyn (2019), for example, has shown how important are politics, legitimacy and legitimisation, also in contexts that had previously been diagnosed as “apolitical’ (see also Duyvesteyn 2005). The same applies, by the way, to the several paths from war to peace and vice versa (as strongly argued by Richards 2005). And there are of course long and strong threads in history and anthropology that have thoroughly deconstructed the state.²

What has been more difficult to tackle with, though, has been the ‘three body problem’: the mutual relationship between state, criminals and rebels in the context of civil wars, and the politics, mechanisms and social processes underlying it. There is still a glaring paucity of output regarding this critical problem. And though the Collier conclusions and consensus has been superseded, many of its underlying assumptions have not. Thus, the assumption that there is a red, shiny, separating line between state-builders, criminals and bearers of genuine grievances is still deeply ingrained in the literature. If that red, neat, separating line between political and criminal actors in civil war contexts existed, it would allow researchers to decide – very much like an entomologist – with a set of history-free taxonomic criteria who is who. It would also support the claim that, if civil war actors are not neatly separated, then they are in essence identical, thus rendering history, context, place and actual people irrelevant.

In this special issue, we tackle head-on the three-body problem, and show that such assumption is the starting point of a wild goose chase. We are not arguing, indeed, that ‘everything goes’, and that all categories merge into a single one. On the contrary. We focus on the historically and politically built nature of their differences, based on their multiple – and also historically built – interactions; on the switching of identities across actors, learning of each other, allying and fighting, arm-twisting and posturing and negotiating about their political identity – or lack of it. The contingent, political and historical nature of these categories is highlighted by the fact that, from the perspective of standard accounts, the political or criminal ‘nature’ of a group depend largely on the fortunes of war.

There are many reasons for this to be the case. The main four we discuss are, first, that the definition of political is in itself a historical/political outcome; secondly, that many actors have incentives to engage with the public sphere, which defines their status; thirdly, that the systems of incentives in which criminal and/or political networks operate are not neatly distinguishable in all cases; and finally, that the State itself may be structurally linked to criminality.

2. Politics as historical outcome

First, what is and is not political is itself a historical and political outcome. Exactly the same can be said about what is criminal, as the dispute about the legality of marihuana, coca, and booze so eloquently shows (e.g., Gootenberg 2016). Achieving a political status is itself an aspiration that must be processed judicially but also politically. Thus, the separation between the illegal and the legal domains, and the very constitution of legal markets, is often the result of explicit political disputes. Probably the best examples here have been provided by the Korean economist Ha (2010): the legality of markets of human beings – slavery-, infants and sex trafficking, among others, has been decided after passionate strife, which not so rarely ended in international or civil wars (see also the Opium Wars, and the American Civil War; Foner 1981, Hanes and Sanello 2002).

Clearly, this also operates in the other direction. Political forces can lose their political status and be declared criminals, the most spectacular example of this being the tagging of the Nazis as a criminal undertaking at Nuremberg (Van der Wilt 2007). But there are many more examples, some of which are discussed in this special issue: some contemporary states have been declared ‘rogue’ and pariahs, among other things due to their links with economic criminality, while other states, with a similar and even worse record of engagement with criminality, are perceived as perfectly legitimate partners of the big powers (Mercille 2011, Tate 2015). In other situations, legal state builders were side-lined while outright criminals were empowered as bona fide interlocutors of the international community (Mandic 2021). These are not purely legal-technical debates; they make clear instead the communicating vessels between politics and crime. The debate about the genuine -that is, political- nature of guerrillas like the FARC-EP have gone on for years, with positions for and against changing depending on the political climate and other calculations. Machuca shows in this issue how much prowess and know-how have been thrown into the effort of building the rhetoric that the FARC-EP was no more than a criminal undertaking (see also Gutiérrez and Thomson 2021). But the passive expression ‘have been’ is itself a black box that deserves to be opened: it involves a network of actors operating through complex forms of collective action, typically merging power structures with different forms of production of knowledge, and enabling or at least sparing some actors at the expense of others (Tate 2015).³

3. Politics, criminality and decision-making processes

Second, and precisely because of the above, all kind of actors have reasons and incentives to participate in the public sphere to define their status – and the status of others – vis-à-vis different combinations of politics and criminality. Certainly, it is NOT the case that economic criminals always aspire to be rhetorically converted into politicians or recognised as such. Many a times they prefer to lie low and actually exhibit their non-political character. Politization – that is, the process through which a group or network tries to build an identity as political actors and to obtain the recognition of such identity by others – is costly, a point that standard liberal views, with their hidden assumption that society is governed by ‘zero friction’ social interactions, tend to miss.

Going political implies becoming highly visible; getting involved in processes of aggregation of interests and of representation, trampling on well-established associations and friendships to change the way they operate, and so on. All this can be very, very bad for business, and some astute criminals have understood this and said it publicly (Gutiérrez-Sanín 2008a). Of course, politization may also mean getting access to decision-making levers and many highly prized goodies. But even after the decision to become political is in effect taken, the ultimate categorisation of who is whom, and who has the right to what, does not depend on the decision of a single actor; it is politically processed. This marks the politics of (de)criminalisation with a strong recursive character that cannot be solved with standard taxonomic procedures.

4. Different actors, different incentives?

Additionally, actors within the political and the criminal domain are operating within networks, ideas, and systems of incentives that are not, in the least, as neatly distinct as is commonly assumed. For example, greediness is not an exclusively criminal characteristic. On the contrary: it is at the core of the system of incentives under which all of us live, one of the reasons for Mann’s assertion that capitalism is ‘constitutionally devious’ (Mann 2013, p. 326). Greed is also not the antonym of politics: it can be institutionally processed and transformed into a collective claim for accessing to resources or to rule-making (Lasswell, 2018). Hobsbawm’s bandits (Hobsbawm 2000) and Blok’s mafia (Blok 1974) were certainly greedy, but they were deeply involved in political processes – something similar could be said of the links between political motivations and ‘social banditry’ in Colombia during the 1950s and 1960s (Sánchez and Meertens 1983). These are core illustrations of the point, but certainly not the only ones.

They do remind us, however, that an essential function of politics and power-building is the aggregation of interests. But then, is the identification of illegality with individual greed something more than the result of a narrow atomistic assumption? In particular, if we are speaking about material interests it is not clear why the illegal bourgeoisie should not or cannot aspire to be represented politically. More broadly: is the process of vying for political representation of people involved in illegal activities so fundamentally different from those that are in the legal economy?

Actually, there seems to be a large lacuna here. Several scholars have offered good reasons to conclude that the processes of representation in both ambits diverge rather substantially. Illegal organisations are less complex and more unstable, their alliances are more fragile, and they have to surmount much more difficult collective action issues, in that their being illegal can make them at the same time more vulnerable and more ‘devious’ (lost opportunities are very costly, there are no tribunals to settle disputes and assign property rights, etc.; e.g., Gambetta 1996). This must have an impact in wars waged in highly criminalised economies (Andreas, 2004), although the impact of involvement of armed groups in illegal activities is differential depending on a number of other factors – more than in the ‘illegal’ activity in question. For instance, the impact of involvement in illicit drugs on a highly disciplined, centralised and collectivist organisation as the FARC-EP in Colombia, was bound to be very different to the impact that involvement in illegal diamond extraction by Liberian militias (c.f. Gutiérrez-Sanín 2008b). So, indeed, the processes of representation of legal and illegal actors may be different in several contexts, but hardly depending solely on the legal or illegal nature of their main activities.

But, then, how much so? Perhaps not as much as is generally, and implicitly, assumed. For one, there are many and very substantial economic contact points between the illegal and the legal sectors, as discussed by Gutiérrez and Ciro in this issue. Both the legal and illegal economies cannot be always neatly told apart – many illegal economies rely on legal industries and processes, and vice versa. The links between legal chemical industries and illegal drugs production is a relevant case in question. Actually, it has strongly and reasonably been argued that illegal and/or borderline economies have been at the heart of the constitution of the modern world (c.f., Cristopher et al. 2007). The other, necessary, side of the coin was that the Colonial and post-Colonial social orders had illegal extractive practices at their very heart, as highlighted already by Wolf when speaking about the origin of peasant wars; in Mexico, bandits provided manpower both for the Villa insurgents, and for the Díaz regime’s militarised police, the rurales (Wolf 1973).

This has not faded away in the least. Think only on the investments – to obtain profit or to launder money – of narcos in key legal economic sectors. Labour can also switch easily from one sector to another. At the same time, activities that are legal, or at least barely legal, can be made illegal, and vice versa. Politicians may as well have strong incentives to try to represent both legal and illegal actors, also in the context of civil war, even if this means incurring in substantial risks. Furthermore, sometimes the interaction of different groups and leaderships with economic criminality triggers mechanisms that can make them not only politically attractive but also more trustworthy, and provide them broader and more solid constituencies, as explored by Gutiérrez-Sanín in this issue.

It is also not too plausible to assign to criminals who try to act politically a single-minded greedy motivation. The building of an identity, in this case a political one, is not an individual decision that involves only an effort to white-wash and lure the unwary into different forms of support, as in Collier and associates’ initial naïve interpretation. It is a complex form of interaction and power-building that requires putting into action different forms of mobilisation, know-how, and coordination. This in turn transforms the public rhetoric, skills and logistics that economic criminals need to advance their agenda - whether they are Somali pirates, Colombian narcos fighting extradition laws to the US, or Kurdish smugglers moving across borders. Actually, the very fact that they have to craft, or adjust, a public rhetoric forces them into new and sometimes unpredicted paths (Elster 1998).

In another, still quite unexplored, direction, the politics of criminalisation has clear distributional effects (Alexander, 2019; see also Gutiérrez and Ciro in this issue). Where there are massive sectors of manual workers linked to illegal economies, like in Colombia (Ciro 2020) this transforms deeply both notions of citizenships and ‘recognition pacts’ (Lund and Eilenberg 2017) through which the state regulates life trajectories and outcomes. This is the case especially where the illegal sector is more efficient and/or socially inclusive than the legal one (Gutiérrez-Sanín 2021).

5. The state -the antipodes of criminality?

Fourth, the state itself – the agent that establishes the separating line between what is legal and what is illegal – may be intimately related to criminal activities, led by active criminals, and pursue criminal objectives (Wolff 2015). And this can be so not by error or by whim of a ‘rogue’ leader, but structurally, by design. By political design, we may be tempted to say.

This led Tilly (1985) to formulate his famous academic boutade according to which the state was a form of criminal activity, which spurred in its moment a wealth of new ideas. But the basic intuition has been out there for long – for very long. Already Saint Augustine was asking himself ‘what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms?’ (Augustine 2017, p. 102) - which falls very near the Tillyian notion of states as rackets writ large. From then on, Late Medieval and Renaissance thinkers went at lengths to understand the complex relationships between criminality, war, politics and statehood, without, however, introducing the assumption that criminals were automatically non-political – among other things because they were seeing how their own power struggles involved a dizzying and complex intermingling of crooks, soldiers of fortune, and political and religious leaders, who frequently merged into the same person (Guarienti 2014, Arditto 2015).⁴ Machiavelli went so far as to write a booklet in honour of one Castruccio Castraccani, a mercenary who he depicts in a very favourable fashion (Winter 2018). But more ‘political’ types were not above open criminality, according to the standards of their time, as Machiavelli himself understood so deeply. Reflecting this fluidity, Bucaneers were at the same time high sea pirates and loyal servants to the crown (Kelsey 2000). Even 19th century Burckhardt (2010) seemed to think that, if state-making was an ‘art’, it left open many opportunities to the shadiest of characters – as happened with any other ‘art’.

If this is applied to what in today’s terminology we would call state-formation, it also was fundamental to the understanding of political regimes. Then, by then, very well-established contrast between ‘healthy’ versions of power and their degenerate counterparts – for example, democracy and ‘anarchy’, aristocracy and oligarchy, monarchy and tyranny – triggered a rich reflection about the opening politics offered to criminal characters. Tyranny seemed in this context particularly abhorrent, in that it was a fully self-regarding form of domination, that operated in the benefit of a single individual and his clique (i.e., Montesquieu’s criticism in Althusser 1992,⁵ Franklin 1992), although some rulers, like the Russian czars and later emperors, sported proudly the title ‘autocrat’ (samoderzhet) (Dukes 1990). But no form of government was spared from the danger of criminalisation (this included of course democracy as a degenerate expression of the self-regarding government of a sector of the population; Sartori 1994). Coercion and power can always be put on the service of shady, or simply particularistic interests (Franklin 1992), using methods that are out, or above, the law.

The assumption that there is a bright red line separating politics and criminality ignores these four issues. It responds to these challenges by putting forward the ideal-type of a benevolent regulator, fully political, that is strictly separated from the sphere of criminal activity. This benevolent reference point can be a ‘non-rogue state’ (treated as an entity neatly and definitionally separated from criminals and illegal violence) or the international community. But this construct, more than an ideal-type in the Weberian sense of the word, is a wholly imaginary moral entity – precisely the type of notion that Machiavelli was criticising when he invited to look at things not as we wanted them to be but as they operated in observed social life -‘la verità effetuale della cosa’ (2017: Position 774 chapter 15).

Contrary to the imaginary standard, and due to the four reasons established above, the relationship between states, international actors and criminality has historically been very intimate (Blok 1974), and has not ceased for a moment – not today, certainly. Actually, perhaps today it is stronger than ever, due to the sheer weight of the illegal sector in the world’s economy. If the reference point of the benevolent regulator has been inherited from a certain practice in economy, where government officials are presumed to be ‘saints’ by those who advised them, as none other than Elinor Ostrom (2005) explained, when used in the context of these inherently troubling issues, it is likely to deeply mislead any analysis.

6. Deconstructing the bright red line

Which takes us directly to this special issue. Its effort does certainly not go in the direction of asserting that politics and economic criminality are identical in civil war contexts. On the contrary, our departure point is the understanding of politics and criminality as two historically differentiated domains of human activity, which play out in different forms vis-á-vis organised political violence. Different, but interrelated and overlapping. Thus, we want to capture their interactions, connections, and convergences. No bright separating line here.

It is of course impossible to do justice in a short set of paragraphs to the richness of the articles that constitute this special issue, but it is worthwhile to flag some of their core propositions. The five papers come basically from two conflicts, the ex-Yugoslavia and the Colombian one.⁶ Nikolic and Petrovic, discussing Serbia as ‘a failed attempt to build a mafia state’, ‘challeng[e] [the] conventional distinction between the state and the organized crime’. They show how deep was the link between state and mafias – broadly understood-, but at the same time how fundamentally political and high-profile, including massive media exposure, was the role of criminalised leaders throughout all the Serbian conflict.

Mandic, on his part, presents a Simmelian model to explain the trajectory of the separatist movements he analyses, which includes the movements themselves, host states and organised crime. Organised crime plays different roles within this triad, some of them distinctly political. Instead of romanticising the so-called ‘international community’, Mandic shows how sometimes it side-lined and sometimes embraced criminalised actors. No benevolent regulators in this depiction – if the reader wants to measure the conceptual distance between this special issue and more standard approaches, it would be enough to contrast the role attributed by Mandic and by Kaldor (1999) to the international community. Mandic’s vision is much blurrier and complex. It is a result not so much of new empirical evidence brought into the analysis (of which there is plenty) but from a fundamentally different form of posing the question. This also applies to the other articles of this special issue.

How do international, national, regional and local actors pick allies and enemies in the context of war? The distributional effects of criminalisation reveal transparent patterns of side-taking but also, more broadly, of state-formation, argue Gutiérrez and Ciro, focusing on the Colombian case, where there has been a ‘Tillyian process’ without ‘Tillyian effects’. Criminalisation and war in Colombia have been part of violent attacks on a specific social sector – basically, peasants and small producers linked to their means of production. They conclude, citing Benjamin, that it is not the absence of the law, but its very existence that creates conflict.

But which are the specific mechanisms that link criminalisation with (de)politization? Gutiérrez-Sanín and Machuca attack the problem from two different angles. Gutiérrez-Sanín shows how the Colombian paramilitaries – that is, pro-regime militias in the international literature parlance- suffered from a political deficit due to their massive link with organised crime, but how at the same time they could build political ties through these links with ever different social sectors. He exhibits the mechanisms that operate in one and the other direction. Once again, the role of big powers and the international community is ambiguous – not to speak about the absence of anything that resembles a benevolent regulator in the whole narrative, while paramilitaries, politicians and states interact in different forms, both cooperative and hostile.

Machuca, on her turn, focuses on the discourse about the allegedly purely criminal character of the Colombian main guerrilla, the FARC-EP. As she shows, this discourse on insurgents has a long tradition. For example, Liberal guerrillas, way before the FARC-EP was formed, were tagged as non-political bandits by the Conservative party governments in the 1950s. Similar examples can be found outside Colombia too. But the notion of rebellion as a form of criminality became hegemonic during the war on drugs. However, powerful was this rhetorical tool to wage the counter-insurgent war, it created severe problems -and opened windows of opportunity for spoilers- in the moment in which a substantial part of the state leadership decided to launch a peace process with the FARC-EP. Machuca shows that war-mongers and peace-mongers were not two distinct sets, and that the narco-guerrilla rhetoric blocked and undermined the peace effort. Politicians are partially prisoners of the discourses they adopt.

The papers, additionally, dialogue with each other -a dialogue which resulted in a workshop on June 10^th, 2021, organised by the USTA and the UNAL in Colombia, where these papers were presented and discussed with the participation of some of the commentators to this special issue. And they also leave open a significant intellectual agenda. If – as all papers argue – understanding the relationship between politics and criminality is fundamental, then how do criminals make politics? For example, it is clear from all our papers that criminalised actors are not illegitimate per se, and that actually sometimes they can successfully establish a bid for legitimacy vis-à-vis different actors, nationally (Lessing and Willis 2019) and internationally (Tate 2015).

How do they build their (different types of) legitimacy (as explored by Haugaard, in this issue) and how and when do they indulge in coercion? Is ‘criminalised war’ – that is, a war whose onset and/or duration is characterised by a strong interaction with economic criminality and organised crime- different from other wars, and then in which sense? This question remains basically open; as Mandic argues, ‘a precise path to conceptualizing how exactly mafias impact insurgencies has remained controversial and elusive’. But it has massive implications. Think about the patterns of violence of war actors against civilians (Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood 2017). Is it changed, and then in which way and through which mechanisms, by the participation of actors defined as criminal? And then again, who defines them as criminal, what are the standards used, and from what perspective can they be regarded as such?

The distributive effects of criminalisation appear as a fundamental underlying theme, as well. Who decides who is criminal, why and when? Are criminalised sectors – below and above – more likely to participate in war, and why? Why do governments decide to de-criminalise actors and how much margin do they have to do so? As of today, our understanding of the politics of (de)criminalisation and its relation to war remains a completely open question.

7. Bringing the state back in – once again

Inevitably, the state is all around this special issue. All papers coincide in that criminality and criminalised economic activities are at the core of the processes of state-formation and rehashing (the state, though not necessarily fading away; it is in the process of continuous transformations; Poggi 2014). Is the relationship between criminality, violence and the state today the same as in the classical violence that takes place in Tillyian/bellicist theory (Spruyt 2017) processes of state-formation? Nikolic and Petrovic argue that no, and all the authors tend to concur, though from different angles. Symptomatically, and fortunately (we believe), our authors do not argue that the notion – frequently issued without a careful consideration of what does that discussion entail and what has changed- that the Weberian notion of the state is fully and simply passé. The claim instead is, according to Mandic in this issue, that the transformation of states is taking place in a wholly different context, where ‘mafias repeatedly determine … their fate’, but this makes their statehood no less real and no less political. It, in fact, frequently shifts the debate of who is or not political to the international arena, where the winners and losers are also picked frequently along distributional criteria. Thus, and typically, the spatial scale at which the issues of politics and criminality are discussed, fought and decided range from the local to the global.

Two examples illustrate the point very clearly. The first one is spatiality itself, a dimension at the heart of practically any working definition of the state. Both in the academic and in public discourse, the development of links between criminality and politics have been attributed to the influence of peripheries, where the state is absent. However, in all the articles of this special issue, we see that the problem is much more complicated; sometimes the state itself creates the conflict and the peripheries, as analysed by Gutiérrez and Ciro, sometimes it makes part of a complex interaction (a triad, in the case of Mandic), sometimes it maintains a complex relationship, marked by collective action issues, with territorial coalitions that guarantee its territorial reach, as proposed by Gutiérrez-Sanín.

This, of course, is not the end of the story. If problems cannot be imputed mechanically to the absence of the state, it is clear that the capacities of states are distributed differentially across the territory, and this may -and in some cases should- have an impact on the nature of conflict and its relation to criminality (and the potential for the politization of criminal actors). This can be comfortably put in the terms of Mann’s concept of ‘infrastructural’ and ‘despotic’ power (as Mann himself does for the Colombian case, 2020),⁷ though of course a lot of conceptual nuancing has to be done here (Soifer 2008). Be it as it may, to understand the relationship between criminality and politics – and the demands of different social sectors in the context of different mixes between one and the other – it will probably be necessary to move towards a more plural notion of types of presence and of absence, and the contents of both categories: what is it precisely that is absent or present? But then how in this typically patchy context are ‘recognition pacts’ (Lund and Eilenberg 2017) between the state and social and war actors built? Note that typically this pact-building process does not take place only at the local and regional, but also at the national and global levels (as all the articles in this issue show).

The second one is warfare and its ‘political’ and/or ‘criminal’ nature. We expect to have opened here a Pandora box in this special issue – only opened it. When does violent conflict have a Tillyian effect and when do they not (a central concern for Gutiérrez and Ciro)? How do criminalised actors operate on the public arena, as discussed by Machuca, and Nikolic and Petrovic? When and how does their criminality undermine their political nature, as investigated by Gutiérrez-Sanín, and Haugaard? and what consequences does this have for the conduct of war and larger processes of state formation? Does criminality – or rather criminalisation, as suggested by Gutiérrez and Ciro- completely prevent distributional logics, triggering the construction of kleptocracies, as discussed in Gutiérrez-Sanín and Haugaard? Do criminality and criminalisation also block peace processes, as suggested by Machuca?

This special issue will not provide all the answers to these questions, but it will show eloquently how important it is to not assume them away.

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.