Francisco Gutiérrez-Sanín - Böcker

This book revisits and reframes the old, but active, debate on the relationship between criminality and civil war by bringing both the state and political power into the equation. It argues that the terms in which the debate is generally posed are still inadequate to address the complexities of this relationship, showing how criminalisation and de-criminalisation are deeply political and hotly contested processes. The shifting movements towards the separation -or convergence- between criminality and politics are part of the processes of constitution of both political power and state. The chapters in the volume flesh out the mechanisms and social dynamics through which this takes place.This edited volume will be of great interest to upper-level students, academics, and researchers in Politics, History and Criminology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Power.

This book revisits and reframes the old, but active, debate on the relationship between criminality and civil war by bringing both the state and political power into the equation. It argues that the terms in which the debate is generally posed are still inadequate to address the complexities of this relationship, showing how criminalisation and de-criminalisation are deeply political and hotly contested processes. The shifting movements towards the separation -or convergence- between criminality and politics are part of the processes of constitution of both political power and state. The chapters in the volume flesh out the mechanisms and social dynamics through which this takes place.This edited volume will be of great interest to upper-level students, academics, and researchers in Politics, History and Criminology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Political Power.

The departure point of this book is the understanding of politics and criminality as two historically differentiated domains of human activity that are different but interrelated, and often co-constitutive and overlapping. In everyday political and domestic life, distinguishing between what is political and what is criminal is achieved through different processes and at different territorial levels. These liminal and overlapping areas between the political and the criminal are highly contested spaces. This book argues against ahistorically drawing a separating line between political armed mobilisation and economic crimi­nality. Each chapter shows that not only insurgents, separatists and other political rebels but also the State and elites can, and generally must (because war waging is not cheap), engage in differ­ent forms of economic criminality as a result of their political status. In no longer separating criminality and politics, this book is able to offer new concepts with which to analyse civil war, political power and criminality.