Earlier this spring, Moisés Naím provocatively warned against an emerging menace facing our world today—the advent of what he terms the “mafia state.” Analyzing the role of transnational organized crime in the age of globalization has been Naím’s bailiwick for some years now, and familiar readers will find little that catches them off-guard. Still, his argument that illicit actors have penetrated national governments with unprecedented success in recent years should be enough for policymakers to take notice. Naím doesn’t mince words about what’s at stake. “In a mafia state, high government officials actually become integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises, and the defense and promotion of those enterprises' businesses become official priorities.”
The new issue of Foreign Affairs—out this week—features a brief response to Naím’s “Mafia States” article by Peter Andreas, a political scientist at Brown University. Rejecting outright the claim that mafia states constitute a “new threat” to international relations, Andreas piles on evidence to suggest quite the contrary. From Latin America to the Balkans, and including even the prohibition-era United States, Andreas convincingly makes the case that the intersection between state power and illicit actors is as old as the modern nation-state itself. Not only that, Andreas contends, the very idea of a mafia state is itself “misleading, and applied so erratically as to become nearly meaningless,” a barb which prompted Naím to issue his own acerbic attack in response.
This exchange of intellectual artillery fire, while impressive to a point, does little to move the discussion forward, however. From a policy point of view, it doesn’t really matter if the relationship between government officials and illicit actors is ...
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