State-Crime Relations: Notes on a Necessary Literature

The aim of this article is to probe the entanglements between politics and organized crime—a question seldom addressed in political theory and in general absent in our reflexive understanding of the “political”. Drawing from historical, sociological and anthropological perspectives, the article distinguishes four useful pathways to address  the political significance of state-crime relations: the functionality of organized crime in local governance, in the functioning of the nation state, in the construction of global hegemonies and in the predatory economic processes configurative of modern capitalism. The article, more generally, underlines the key but overlooked importance of organized crime and illegal economies in the creation of modern social orders.