War Making and State Making as Organized Crime

Abstract

If protection rackets represent organized crime at its smoothest, then war making and state making—quint essential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy—qualify as our largest examples of organized crime. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making. In the course of making war, extracting resources, and building up the state apparatus, the managers of states formed alliances with specific social classes. To the extent that the threats against which a given government protects its citizens are imaginary or are consequences of its own activities, the government has organized a protection racket. Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. Early in the state-making process, many parties shared the right to use violence, the practice of using it routinely to accomplish their ends, or both at once.