Vincenzo Ruggiero

New social movements and the ‘centri sociali’ in Milan

This paper discusses the social movement known in Italy as the movement of the centri sociali. The empirical material presented relies heavily on the centri sociali operating in Milan. Such material offers the opportunity to revisit issues related to social movement theories. In part one, a brief overview of these theories is sketched, and concepts suggested by both resource mobilisation theorists and new social movements theorists are presented. Attempts to unify the two approaches are also briefly reviewed. In part two, the origin of the centri sociali is traced. Some of the motives and practices inspiring the movement are described as a legacy, though re-elaborated and re-contextualised, of the particularly troubled, if compelling, Italian 1970s. The methodology used for the empirical work undertaken is then presented. Finally, the discussion moves back to social movement theories, against which the movement of the centri sociali is analysed. Here, the utility of some aspects of both resource mobilisation and new social movement theories will be underlined, thus adding a modest, tentative, contribution to previous attempts to elaborate a synthesis between the two approaches.

Criminals and service providers: cross-national dirty economies

This article examines the recent evolution of transnational crime. By focusing on two specific criminal activities, namely the trafficking in human beings and the illicit trafficking in arms, it tries to establish the relationship between conventional criminal organisations and the official economy. It concludes by observing that the illegal services provided by conventional criminals to official economic actors are made increasingly redundant, because the latter tend to set up their own illegal practices which service their activity.

Criminalizing War: Criminology as Ceasefire

This article attempts to argue that the notion of ‘war as value’ has enjoyed unmerited longevity, and that a sociological-criminological analysis of war may today lead to its unconditional criminalization. Before presenting the criminalization argument, however, a brief analysis of how mainstream criminology has failed to address war and of the recent development of a new criminology of war is provided. Functionalism, labelling, conflict theory, abolitionism, ideas around corporate and state crime, as well as social disadvantage, in the form of international relative deprivation, are discussed with a view to determining whether within criminology itself pacifist resources can be found.

Drug Economics: A Fordist Model of Criminal Capital?

The author suggests that there has been a reorganisation of the structure of criminal business. This features a greater concentration of power to those who act as wholesalers and importers from those who distribute drugs. This division of labour is gendered and racially structured reflecting the legal job market.

How public is public criminology

A variety of opinions and observations about public sociology are reviewed in this paper, which then examines how criminology (as a branch of sociology) has reacted to the call to ‘go public’. Dilemmas, potential strengths and manifest weaknesses are brought to light. These, it will be argued, are mostly due to the peculiar disciplinary position of criminology, an area of enquiry which, by claiming improbable independence from sociology, is forced to neglect those very sociological concepts that would indeed make it more ‘public’.

Sentenced to normality: The Italian political refugees in Paris

The author describes the widely unknown reality of Italian asylum seekers in France. Ex-political activists of the left, they were forced to cross the internal borders of so-called Fortress Europe. The juridical anomaly of their status is highlighted, and their living conditions and political reflections reported. A phenomenon that most would think confined to the unfortunate victims of some Latin American dictatorship, or to the highly glamourized dissidents of ex-Communist countries, is instead occurring within democratic united Europe.

Dichotomies and contemporary social movements

In this essay Vincenzo Ruggiero explores the dichotomy between theories of new social movements that draw upon rationalist/resource‐mobilization approaches and those that focus on collective identity and cultural difference as key motivators. Taking contemporary social movements (CSMs) engaged in opposition to globalizing neo‐liberalism (from anti‐G8 protests to the World Social Forums) as the focus of analysis, the paper argues that because ‘the different components of the movement have extremely diversified needs’ it is as difficult for activists as it is for researchers to identify a common purpose or set of unifying principles. However, Ruggiero suggests that by refusing to succumb to traditional organizational ‘leader‐follower’ paradigms, CSMs begin to resemble the ‘free city’ of ‘the multitude’, which so bewildered Kreons messenger from the dictatorial city‐state of Thebes. The multitude do not speak with one voice, however, and in this ‘movement of movements’ we find rejectionists that eschew all forms of engagement with capitalisms economic and social manifestations, international solidarity activists building resistance ‘from below’ with grass roots movements around the world, and finally regulators and reformers who seek to utilize existing legal and democratic resources to constrain and encourage corporations into more pro‐social and pro‐environmental behaviour. Ultimately, though, CSMs are attempting to work through the eternal conflict between reason and utopia—imagining Rimbauds new life while, as Marx implored, changing the existing world, or as Ruggiero puts it—‘between real achievement and contestation of the official notion of the real’.

Terrorism: cloning the enemy

This article was a first attempt to analyse political violence from a criminological perspective. It led to a commissioned book from the criminology editor of Open University Press.

Social disorder and the criminalization of indolence

Social disorder is constructed in particular ways around certain groups, and widely used to serve certain particular interests. It may contribute to mobilizing despair as a political weapon rather than demands for justice. Appropriated by powerful groups, and turned into fear, it reflects, reshapes and reinforces the status quo (Shirlow and Pain, 2003). In common understandings ‘social disorder’ is associated with behaviour involving potentially threatening strangers, ‘verbal harassment on the street, open solicitation for prostitution, public intoxication and rowdy groups of young males in public’ (Sampson, 2009, p. 1). Physical disorder, in turn, is typically referred to markers such as graffiti, abandoned cars, garbage and the proverbial ‘broken window’. In the following pages I will deal with some neglected aspects of the debate on social disorder, arguing that fear in public spaces transcends the potential criminal nature of the threat experienced. Through a brief historical excursus, social disorder will be linked with the perception of certain groups as troublesome individuals, useless young people who fail to act as consumers. I will suggest that what is feared, in other words, is less the criminal capacity of these groups than their indolence, their absence from markets and their relative deprivation.

Marginal economies and collective action

Taylor and Francis Ltd CCIT_A_266756. gm 10.1080/13 04810701669132 ity: Analysis of Urban Trends 360-4813 (pri t)/1470-3629 (online) Original Article 2 07 & Francis 1 30 00 December 2007 V ncenzoRuggiero v. uggiero@mdx.ac.uk here is a fundamental ambivalence in the study of closed, marginal, supposedly deviant communities. This is due to the position they occupy vis-à-vis the official society, which is simultaneously central and eccentric, but also to the sense of bewilderment experienced by those studying them in discovering the proximity of such communities to the core values of the surrounding legitimate world. Is the ghetto a metaphor for society as a whole? Is deviance ‘scandalously’ similar to conventional behaviour? Personally, after devoting many years to the study of illicit economies in urban settings I find it hard to pin down where the illicitness precisely resides. Similarly, and long before me, Robert Merton (1968) described as ‘innovators’ criminals pursuing legitimate goals (money and success) with illegitimate means, for the experimental way in which they test new modalities of adhering to the norm. In this sense, gangsters such as Al Capone, in Merton’s view, exemplify the triumph of amorality over morally prescribed failure. This latest tour de force by Loïc Wacquant raises an array of issues, including the ones just mentioned, which pertain not only to the field of the sociology of deviance, but to a number of specific areas, including the notion of illicit markets, the interpretation of violence, the concept of collective action and the new ways of superseding neo-liberal philosophies. I would like to address each separately.