Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy and Political Collapse [Paperback]

The author draws on behavioral ecology to predict the evolution of organized crime in unregulated systems of exchange and the further development of racketeer economies into unstable kleptocratic states. The result is a new model that explains the expansion and contraction of political-economic complexity in prehistoric and contemporary societies.1. Introduction 1.1 Secret Vices 1.2 What is Organized Crime? 1.3 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 1.4 Case Study: Post-Soviet Russia 1.5 Gangs as Primitive States 1.6 Collapse and Regeneration 1.7 Darwinian Political Economy 2. What is Organized Crime? 2.1 Formal Verses Informal Economies 2.2 Organized Crime as Racketeering 2.3 Descriptive Vignette: Camorra 2.4 The Organization of Crime 2.5 Racketeering in Prison Economies 2.6 The Organization of a Stateless Campus Economy 2.7 Labor Rackets 2.8 Gambling Rackets 2.9 Prohibition 3. Failing Economics 3.1 Contaminated Markets 3.2 The Cold War in Economic Thinking 3.3 The Road to Friedmanistan 3.4 Experimental Vignette: The Other Invisible Hand 4. The Evolution of Racketeering 4.1 Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Ecology 4.2 Evolutionary Stable Strategies 4.3 Cheating and Systemic Complexity 4.4 Racketeering as an Evolutionary Stable Strategy 4.5 ESS Thinking: Farming and Raiding 4.6 From Raiding to Protection Rackets 4.7 Supply and Demand 4.8 The Geography of Protection 4.9 Narrative Vignette: Raiding and Trading on the Steppes 5. Organized Crime and Kleptocracy 5.1 From Gangs to Primitive States 5.2 The Underworld as Prehistory 5.3 Territoriality, Leadership, Violence 5.4 Prehistoric Gangster-States 5.5 Early European Gangster-States 5.6 Mafia Branding: The Exquisite Corpse 5.7 Narrative Vignette: Under the Cartels 5.8 The Gangsterization of Democracy 5.9 Scenes from a Kleptocracy 5.10 Cuba Case Study 5.11 Comparative Vignettes 5.12 Hispa?ola 5.13 Haiti 5.14 Zaire 5.15. Post-Soviet Gangster-States 5.16 Narrative Vignette: After the USSR 5.17 Post Script: American Exceptionlă+