Organisierte Kriminalität als historisches Forschungsfeld. Überlegungen zu Ost- und Südosteuropa
Organized Crime as a Field of Historical Research. Reflections on Eastern and Southeastern Europe

Summary/Abstract: Abstract. Organized crime is a concept employed by criminologists, legal scholars and economists. As such, it has frequently been used to describe post-socialist realities. This paper insists that organized crime also has a historical dimension and sketches out possible conceptual definitions and fields of historical research. While dominant legal and police approaches tend to measure “delinquency” against the “objective” norms of the state, a history of organized crime needs to address questions of political legitimacy. Since little preliminary work has been done on the history of organized crime in the Balkans, the author partly draws on concepts developed by scholars of Southern Italy and Russia.

• Details
• Contents