What Sustains Paralegal Power? Historical insights from the Italian Mafias
Talk by Associate Professor Christina Jerne, Aarhus University.
Abstract
What differentiates the mafia from many other forms of organised crime is its ambition and success in controlling a territory. Beyond monopolising markets and extracting profits, another strategy for exercising this control is to forge and maintain an intimate relationship with institutionalised power. However, what is most striking, in my view, is not so much its ability to influence and infiltrate the state apparatus per se. Rather, it is the variety of sites and infrastructures it utilises to exert social control that is remarkable.
I conceptualise the mafia as a paralegal form of power that derives its social influence and wealth from the parasitic use of other dominant and/or legitimate forms of power (e.g. democracy, the kingdom, the corporation, patriarchy, the fiefdom, the church, the fandom).
Drawing on my work translating key figures engaged with the mafia question from 1876 to 2021, such as judges (Giovanni Falcone), political theorists (Gaetano Mosca), trade unionists (Pio La Torre), journalists (Giuseppe Fava), generals (Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa), and priests (Don Diana), my talk seeks to answer the following question: what has made this form of power endure? What makes it resilient, allowing it to sustain itself from post-feudalism to hyper-globalisation?
In addressing this question, I aim both to summarise empirical findings on political duration and to galvanise a broader debate on resilient forms of social violence that transcend the mafia's specificity.