In 2004, I was a graduate student in a western European city when I discovered a new café on my block. It had few frills: cheap furniture, almost nothing edible on the menu, and when I peered through the door to the kitchen, I saw nothing more than a toaster on the counter. The owner turned out to be Kurdish, and when he realized my family came from the same region in Eastern Turkey, he invited me for a cup of tea and a snack. As we sat down in a corner and began chatting, a slim man in a sports jacket walked in, and the owner excused himself. He walked behind the counter, reached under a cupboard, and with a dead serious face handed the clearly-not-a-customer an envelope. Then he rejoined me and continued extolling the virtues of the PKK, the Kurdish separatist movement in Turkey. I walked away from the get-together thinking I had just witnessed a scene from The Sopranos.

Danilo Mandić has written an accessible, concise, and lucid study of exactly what had happened during that interaction, namely how organized crime fares in the face of separatism. The book consists of three parts: the first on conceptualization, the second on Kosovo and South Ossetia, and the final one on “three regions”: West Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The central in the book is that organized crime groups have the capacity, within so-called “torn states” – i.e., countries riven by conflict – to either undermine their host states by supporting separatist movements or to promote state-building and territorial cohesion by defending the incumbent state. In other words, mafias and gangsters are neither apolitical nor beholden to any political ideology.

The classic theory of state formation is that when a state retreats, organized crime fills the gaps. In other words, state and crime were seen as mutually exclusive in the economic and political spaces they aspire to control. But organized crime is often more complementary than exclusive, and the commonalities between the two are striking. They both claim control of a territory, and impose governance and order with clear rules on its inhabitants. Beyond commonalities, there is a wide scope of forms of collusion and amalgamation between the two. The same can be said for the adversaries of the state, argues Mandić: separatists who fight the state. The core of the book then is an in-depth investigation and comparison of the separatist conflicts in Georgia and South Ossetia, as well as Serbia and Kosovo. The author’s long bouts of fieldwork in all of the above countries and regions is deeply impressive (and surely made for some interesting anecdotes that did not end up in the book), and merits a separate essay some day on how to best conduct fieldwork in these regions.

The book develops the notion of four types of mafias (35), partisan versus impartial ones on one axis, and state-dependent versus independent ones on the other axis. Most organized crime groups can be grouped within one of these four categories. This is a welcome unpacking of an opaque set of relationships, and the intellectual ambitions of the book, as well as the risks it takes, is laudable. These different types of mafias can then assume one of three attitudes and positions towards a separatist conflict: a “rejoicing third” benefits from conflict but does not cause it, a “divider and ruler” proactively creates conflict to secure a dominant position or other gains, and a “mediator” assuages the factors that produce tension between the two. This useful model can explain why in some conflicts, there is organized crime cooperation across enemy lines. Or that other conflicts could have ended long ago, but for “some reason” linger on indefinitely.

Gangsters and Other Statesmen is a short book, which has advantages, but at times it sacrifices depth for parsimony – e.g. when the reader would like to learn more about the dynamics of postwar organized crime in Serbia (49). Mandić also does not disaggregate organized crime enough, instead lumping organizationally and structurally different groups like “mafia,” “cartel,” “crime syndicate,” or others into one and the same analytical category. Furthermore, blanket observations such as “virtually all nations are founded on one or another major crime” (175) trivialize significant differences between the levels of violence in the establishment of states. Finally, some conclusions enter a normative field (for example, the legitimacy of separatist nationalisms) or, quite the opposite, veer toward an amoral perspective on the deeply destructive potential of organized crime. An afterthought: normally one would not worm their own publication into a book review, but Mandić’s book fits hand-in-glove with my own Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State, in that I look at a similar phenomenon but from the perspective of the state rather than the separatists. As such, the two books are like a photo negative: they shed light on organized crime from two different angles. All in all, the central contribution that this fine book makes to the field is a clear argument on why organized crime gets involved in separatism, a successful combining of state-building theories with criminological perspectives. As such, the book will be of interest primarily to scholars, but also for a wider graduate-level student readership.