Week 15: State Power and Crime

State involvement in illegal schemes is always seen as different, or even entirely disconnected, from the state’s constant attempts to establish a law-based social order. The broadly accepted premise is that the state establishes the order in society through lawful means; that is, through formal institutional frameworks, rules, and procedures. If then, observable regularities in behavior and expectations are the out-come of such lawful means, law-breaking behaviors on the part of state authorities only serve to distort and subvert this social order. Under these assumptions, the flip-side of the state, commonly referred to as the ‘submerged state’, ‘narco-state’, ‘criminalized state’, ‘parallel state’, ‘parapolitics’, ‘deep state’ or ‘clandestine state’, forms a marginal if not a decidedly exotic field of study, and one that proves itself to be repeatedly disruptive in relation to the core questions of political sociology.

The privileged status of legal structures over informal and illegal ones remains the dominant approach to understanding the behavior of the state when establishing order but is not without criticism. A rapidly growing body of literature is insistent in its assertion that informal institutions and illegal behavior should feature more prominently in discussions of the topic. Contrary to the assumption that state involvement in illegality necessarily precludes the production of socially accepted outcomes, this body of literature suggests that illegal state behavior may establish social order; that is, empirical social regularities that can be expected and communicated. This latter phenomenon – connecting state structures with law-breaking behavior – is the subject of this chapter. I begin with a definition of the phenomenon before discussing several key themes pertinent to its analysis. To conclude, I briefly outline several lines of research that I believe holds particular potential for develop- ing the field. In light of the huge array of literature on illegal behavior, mainly regarding organized crime and corruption, the review is focused on seminal contributions.