301271 Decolonizing organized crime (S) (WiSe 2022/2023)

The debate on organized crime has been dominated by experts, media, popular culture, and specific experiences from the Global North. In the early 20th century first glimpses of organized crime in the US were related to criminal activities of foreign, ethnically homogenous groups. This racist “Alien Conspiracy” theory evolved into the “mafia” and later “illicit enterprises”, definitions that focus on the supply side of illegal products and services. With the War on Drugs declaration, the drug trade organizations of Colombia and later Mexico became synonyms for organized crime. Recently, discourses on globalization and international terrorism gave rise to the concept of “Transnational Organized Crime”. Throughout the historical entanglement of the definition and empiric studies of organized crime, we see a drift between the localization of the phenomenon and universalist legal approaches, engendering violent power asymmetries. Definitions from the Global North shape policies and everyday life experiences in the Global South under neocolonial conditions. In this course, we make visible the inherent coloniality in knowledge production and domination over the definition of organized crime. The analysis reveals local consequences of the internationalization of the politics of criminal law and dominant global linear thinking to offer emancipated comprehensions as the basis for alternative policies. Such endeavor emphasizes the coexistence of temporalities and the necessary “provincialization” of the western dominant definition of organized crime, sensitive to local communal experiences. This “epistemological decolonization” of scholarship provides the basis for different views on organized crime, security policies, and drug policy in an InterAmerican perspective that stresses the socio-historic entanglement of concepts and practices. Decolonizing organized crime also deepens current interdisciplinary debates on decolonizing the politics of criminal justice.

This course will be taught in English. For Spanish or German original literature, English translations will be provided.

Objectives of the course:

• Critically analyze the definitions of and theoretic approaches to organized crime.
• Reflect on decoloniality as a tool to uncover relations of coloniality.
• Relate views on decolonizing organized crime to broader debates of transnational justice.
• Evaluate the usefulness of decoloniality to advance the theoretic notions of organized crime.

Bibliography

Background readings:

• Aliverti A, Carvalho H, Chamberlen A, et al. (eds) (2022) Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Rethinking the Legacies, Epistemologies and Geographies of Criminal Justice. Oxford
• Blagg, H, Thalia, A (2019) Decolonising Criminology. London
• Block, A. A. (1983). East side-west side: organizing crime in New York, 1930-1950. New Brunswick
• Kaltmeier, Olaf, et al. (Eds.) (2020): The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy and Governance in the Americas. Milton Park
• Mignolo, W. and Walsh, C. (2018) On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics praxis. Durham
• Von Lampe, K. (2016). Organized crime: analyzing illegal activities, criminal structures and extra-legal governance. Los Angeles