Alexander Kupatadze

Published by Palgrave Macmillan (2012)

ISBN: 978-0230299801

From the backcover


For this innovative study, the first situating organized crime in the debate on state formation, Alexander Kupatadze interviewed over one hundred respondents including criminals, law enforcement officials, and politicians in post-Soviet Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan to map the divergent patterns of organized crime in these countries following their Coloured Revolutions. Drawing upon unique case studies of criminal activity, the authortraces the thin line dividing the licit and illicit spheres, or 'upper' and 'under' economic and political worlds. Kupatadze argues that state formation in post-Soviet Eurasia has been heavily marked by struggle for the dominance between political elites and organized crime groups that involved various forms of contention and collaboration. In reassessing the nature of state criminalization, Kupatadze introduces three dimensions of the state that determine the patterns of dominance: political-coercive, economic-taxation and ideological-informational. He distills the variables surrounding organized crime into contextual (geography, regional wars) and intermediate (related with the Coloured Revolutions such as participation of civil society, resources of competing political groups). This work is an important contribution to the study of organized criminality and state formation.

Why buy the book?

  • The major study situating organized crime in the debate on state formation;
  • The first study that explains the impact of political transitions on organized crime, and vice versa;
  • One of the first systematic efforts to make sense of and explain the variety of organized crime trajectories in the post-Soviet Eurasia;
  • Unlike major studies of organized crime focusing on Russia, this comparative study discusses the crime and corruption issues of three geographically and culturally distinctive countries in post-Soviet Eurasia and hence elaborates on the regional variations in organized crime;
  • Unique empirical data generated through 130 interviews in three post-Soviet countries.