Les mafias

Abstract

In Italy, four mafia organisations take part in systematic criminality. They are political entities constituted to fit social and economic surroundings. They exercise sovereignty on a territory. Anchored to their “home base”, where they wield absolute power, the mafia organisations structure and perpetuate a violent and illegal system. They deal with a huge network of accomplices. They animate cultural schemes and benefit from a social consensus coming from the population.

Italian mafias are vast scientific objects. They were born with private property spreading at the beginning of the 19th century. Progressively, the underworld has grown in concomitance with the new modern Italian state born only in 1860. Over one century and a half, politicians have used the mafias as a way to administer the South of Italy.

The end of a bipolar world has swept across Italy. It has led to the fall of the political system based on mafia collusion. The first Italian Republic (1945-1992) was over. Immediately, the mafia lost the political and « military » power included in the American containment strategy which consisted in preventing any of the free world countries to fall to communism. Losing impunity and their official partner, the Sicilian mafia decided to find other ways.

Since the end of the antagonism between the two blocks, the mafia’s power has been growing stronger. Italian mafias control their territories and have a transnational dimension. They embody this movement of knowledge, money, goods and person in

which the governmental actors are less and less frequent. The Mafias participate in the global and integrated economy. They reflect this new deal and the structural and systematic phenomenon of the globalisation.