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| Federico Varese |
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Based on ten years of ground-breaking fieldwork and filled with dramatic stories, Mafias on the Move assesses the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias, as they take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. The truth, however, is more complicated.
Federico Varese has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. Varese spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately, the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity.
In a series of matched comparisons, Varese charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early 20th century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. He explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. In a pioneering chapter on China, he examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland.
Federico Varese teaches Criminology at the University of Oxford, and is one of the world’s most eminent authorities on organized crime. Educated at the University of Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge, his began his career carrying out field research in post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s, which resulted in his doctoral thesis and a prize-winning book, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (2001), translated into Polish, Dutch, and shortly into Chinese. In 2010 he published a four-volume edited anthology entitled Organized Crime. A key feature of his most recent work is the use of the comparative method and social network analysis to map how mafias move, both within and between countries, and is the subject of his latest book, Mafias on the Move. He has also a parallel interest in the rescue of persecuted minorities and has written on the rescue of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe. |
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09/12/2011 ore 17:00
Jardin de l'Ange |
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