engleski

Crime as a Business, Business as a Crime

This paper endorses the claim that in transitional societies the line between business and crime is elusive because weak states foster a legal order that is formalistic, bureaucratic, politically biased and prone to corruption. Three elements are discussed in the paper. First, the paper briefly analyses legal and institutional state of affairs in transitional Western Balkans societies that condone organised crime. Secondly, it investigates the phenomenology of the (corruptive) crime behaviour, explaining how it managed to integrate into society in the context of a weak state. Thirdly, the paper investigates why state policies and measures fail to fight crime as the business. In this part of the paper, contests a traditional definition of criminal organisation as a hierarchical one, claiming that mafias are not organizations in a traditional sense. The paper emphasizes that the fight against organised crime is not just a fight against individuals or individual criminal behaviour ; but a fight to increase the efficiency of the government. The paper furthermore asserts that better understand of the organised crime problem can occur only if its fighting and addressing happens from the point of view of a good governance. Namely, the precondition to fight against organised crime or parallel activity requires increased efficiency and capacity of governmental institutions. This paper adds to the academic and practical understanding of the organised crime in the post-transitional settings. Apart from being instructive and up-todated source of information for the regional setting it deals with, the paper sheds a new light on understanding of organised crime.

organised crime ; organisation ; transition ; money laundering ; Southeastern Europe

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