Francesco Strazzari

Corruption in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo: a deal among friends

Since the late 1990s international state builders have paid increasing attention to fighting corruption in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. On the surface this effort has brought significant results, since both countries have adopted legal frameworks modelled on the best practices of Western democracies. In practice, however, corruption remains rampant. This disappointing outcome has several explanations: in reviewing the empirical evidence we consider the two countries as cases involving heavily assisted transition from both socialism and war, highlighting how collusive practices between political and criminal interests have played a role in establishing formally liberal but substantively ‘hybrid’ institutions. We argue that the spread of corruption has been implicitly legitimised by international actors, who have pressured local parties to accept the formal architecture of good governance, including anti-corruption legislation, while turning a blind eye to those extra-legal structures and practices perceived as functional to political stability.

L'Oeuvre au Noir : The Shadow Economy of Kosovo's Independence

The article analyses the nexus between illicit economy, violent conflict and peacetime politics in Kosovo. It examines political agendas, client interests and transnational criminal activities, taking into account the interaction between local and international actors involved in peacebuilding. While making sense of emerging trends and regularities, the analysis identifies dilemmas and challenges that counter-crime strategies have to address in Kosovo. The contention is that elements of historical discontinuity are discernible but the global economy remoulds traditional structures, and grey and black market profits give organized crime a formidable opportunity to emancipate itself from the role of service provider, often allowing direct intervention in the management of political violence and in crafting the state-making project.

The sack of Mostar, 1992–1994: The politico‐military connection

To date, most of the academic and journalistic accounts and analyses have treated the Bosnian War as a relatively uniform conflict among two or three warring parties along a nearly 1,000 km‐long front line. Yet the most militarily charged and conflictual spots along this line were several strategic urban areas such as Bihac, Mostar, Sarajevo, Brcko, Tuzla, Srebrenica and Gorazde. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina can thus also be viewed as a collection of local wars. By focusing on the case of Mostar the authors argue that these local conflicts were part of a state‐building process, but that, due to the connivance among the different militias and state armies on the ground, the Mafia‐style war economy, as well as thanks to the newly emerged ethnically based institutions and ruling elites, such process resulted in a polity that more resembles a seventeenth‐century pirate colony than a modern state. In this sense the word ‘sack’ instead of ‘war’ describes more aptly the politico‐military dimension of the wa...

State, Secession, and Jihad: The Micropolitical Economy of Conflict in Northern Mali

ABSTRACT This article explores the nexus between conflicting geopolitical imaginaries and socioeconomic tensions in northern Mali, examining microlevel processes whereby extralegal and criminal economies have reshaped political and armed mobilization, especially among Tuareg who fought to draw the borders of an independent Azawad and jihadists affiliated with the MUJAO Islamist group who sought to abolish all borders. Secessionist, jihadist, and statist political projects must be interpreted in light of the dynamics of armed protection, extraction, and clientelist connivance underlying processes of territorialization and social mobility in a hybrid regional order whose peripheral location no longer serves as a geopolitical insulator.

The Decade Horribilis: Organized Violence and Organized Crime along the Balkan Peripheries, 1991–2001

The 10-year-long cycle of war that swept the Balkan peripheries saw the soldering of nationalist agendas, local clientelistic interests, and transnational illicit activities. This investigation seeks to shed light on the nexus that exists between this collusive admixture and the process of violent geopolitical rearticulation. Using mainly investigative journalism and specialized research, the author explores underground political economies, mapping out illicit flows, reading the modifications in routes and distribution modalities in connection with power shifts and war. The analysis moves from the Croatian secession to the explosion of the ‘Albanian question’, from the underpinnings of Miloševićs regime to the independence of Montenegro. The author identifies distinctive regularities that underlie the symbiotic relationship between political power and organized crime structures: a possible discontinuity is discerned in the longue durée trajectory of state making, war making and illicit trades. While the political holds primacy, the global neo-liberal economy de-structures traditional organizational models, empowers intermediation, and gives organized crime a formidable opportunity to emancipate itself from the traditional role of provider, often allowing direct intervention in the management of political violence and in the moulding of state structures.

Introduction: Rethinking Challenges to State Sovereignty in Mali and Northwest Africa

ABSTRACT In framing its analysis around the concept of northwest Africa, this article examines not only the challenges for regional security and state authority in that region but also the processes through which regions are constructed by both local and international actors. It focuses especially on northern Mali and the various types of separatist, jihadist, and criminal networks that operate in this territory. The goal of this article, and of the special issue to which it is an introduction, is to illuminate emerging political orders in northwest Africa.

US mainland, EU archipelago? Convergence and divergence on transnational organized crime

The fight against organized crime has become a top security priority for the European Union (EU). While a new policy area is emerging, it is difficult to understand who is in lead and how the process develops. This article delves into the post-Lisbon EU security model, exploring how Washington and Brussels collaborate in combating organized crime in a context of changing definitions, actors and policies. It argues that US definitions, operational models and policies influence EU institutional thinking and policies, shifting the emphasis from prevention and rule of law to execution and intelligence. The dynamics of policy convergence and divergence on criminal matters in the transatlantic community reflect tectonic shifts in the deepest levels of thinking security in the West, affecting the moulding of a European security identity.

Foreign Fighters as a Challenge for International Relations Theory

Although the existence of foreign fighters is nothing new in the international arena, the phenomenon has not yet triggered a substantial reflection in International Relations (IR) theory. A relatively rare phenomenon before the 1980s, foreign fighters have so far received little attention under IR. This state of affairs began to change in the spring of 2014, when a jihadist armed group that incorporates an unprecedented number of foreign recruits—the Islamic State (IS)—proclaimed a ‘Caliphate’ spanning large portions of Syrian and Iraqi territory and captured global attention by widely circulating to the media all sorts of terror tactics and war crimes it systematically perpetrates. This chapter seeks first of all to bring foreign fighters into an IR analytical focus by identifying those trends that make them a discrete actor category distinct from insurgents and terrorists. Second, it addresses some of the difficulties in grasping the question from an IR theory angle, beginning with transnational mobilisation and State sponsorship. Finally, it reflects on how foreign fighters are involved in State-making/un-making, and how this affects movements in the tectonics of the international system.

Libyan Arms and Regional Instability

As security continues to be a primary challenge in post-Qadhafi Libya, the availability of weapons to nearby opposition groups and armed insurgencies is a source of major concern for Libya’s neighbours and the international community. Uncontrolled weapons proliferation and the rise of new armed groups have gone hand in hand across various conflict fronts. While what is known about weapons acquisition dynamics does not make it possible to establish a strict causal relationship, by observing variations in the various contexts, critical factors can be identified, such as the emergence of a protection market, the multiplication of tactical options and splintering processes, which facilitate comprehension of how greater circulation of weapons is related to regional volatility and destabilisation.

Trans-Albanian vs Pan-Albanian spaces: the urban dimension of the Albanian question

This paper focuses on nationalism along Albanian-speaking European peripheries. Waves of organized violence, political turmoil, and powerful processes of demographic and socioeconomic transformation have changed the face of Albanian cities, thus modifying the physical and social landscape. The exploration of these dynamics aims to shed light on how the nexus that historically exists between the construction of an urban stronghold, the articulation of nationalist ideologies, and state-making processes is being re-defined in light of changing external conditions determined by Europeanization and globalization. Although evidence remains highly ambivalent, investigating such a dimension might be useful in detecting the emergence of an embryonic trans-Albanian national discourse, whose content does not necessarily coincide with traditional pan-Albanian constructs. Situated between transnational city networks and rearticulated through the EU perspective, the “Albanian question” is undergoing transformation that is much deeper than the nationalist canon is willing to admit. Disclosing new understandings of this magmatic historical process might pave new ways for political agency aiming at the sustainability of regional political processes.