| Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Defying the mafia with everyday acts of resistance
For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal organizations are renowned for their vast international business enterprises, the collective actions taken to oppose them are less known. In Opposition by Imitation, Christina Jerne explores anti-mafia activism, revealing how ordinary people resist, counter, and prevent criminal economies from proliferating. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among anti-mafia alliances in Campania, Sicily, and other parts of Italy, Jerne details a particular aspect of mafia activities: providing cash relief and other forms of patronage to individuals and groups. Her research shows how activism has evolved to imitate this sustaining role. Activists are increasingly challenging mafia control both by creating alternative economies—from producing food that interrupts mafia labor practices to organizing tourism that supports anti-mafia hospitality—and by subversively adopting business tactics similar to the mafia’s to compete with their social influence and legitimacy. Exposing the political implications of this mimetic opposition, Jerne points to its potential impact on crime prevention and criminalization, both in Italy and globally. Opposition by Imitation shows how these modern-day Robin Hoods are redefining collective action, taking what was controlled by the mafias and returning it to the collective. This contentious economic turn, against the backdrop of broader social movements, reveals significant political possibilities afforded by imitative opposition. 
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| Resilient Social Violence This concluding chapter summarises some of the key insights from the chapters of the book. It argues that the mafia transcends an organization of criminals, but might be read as a particular form of paralegal power, founded on resilient expressions of social violence. Drawing on empirical examples from the texts gathered in the anthology, two themes are identified are being distinctive to mafia power throughout its history: political entrepreneurship and social poverty. The chapter traces several details of these dimensions, and suggests that it could be beneficial to explore these in a comparative manner, that is by inserting them in a broader and more global conversation on persistent forms of paralegal power. 
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| The Diversity of Solidarity Economies: A View from Danish Minority Gangs The term “solidarity economy” is most commonly deployed to describe altruistic and socially beneficial ways of doingbusiness, often in opposition to ones that are less so. Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork among Danish minority gangs, this article seeks to open the discussion on solidarity economies beyond these traditional understandings by addingthe perspective of gangs. It explores the more exclusive and violent aspects of solidarity economies, drawing on the analytical lenses of reciprocity and pooling. These dimensions afford the tracing of the conditions of solidarity within that group, rather than the mere verification of its absence orpresence. I conclude that (A) solidarity economies are empirically multiple, operating on different and (a)synchronous planes as well as expressing themselves in different types; (B) solidarity is analytically beneficial for reading for economic difference; and lastly that (C) in this context,solidarity economies are inhabited as sites of struggle between two opposite,but specular forms of cultural fundamentalism. |
| Activating limit as method: an experiment in ethnographic criminology. All research aims to find, challenge, investigate or push limits within a given field of knowledge. But what happens if, rather than viewing limits as inherent premises or side-effects of a research process, one activates them as tools? This chapter exemplifies a conceptual experiment with the methodological affordances of limits, through the classical Spinozian approach to affect. After introducing some relationships between limits and affects, it explores how one may actively use these types of affective occurrences within the specifics of an ethnography of Danish gangs. In particular it proposes three different modes of relation as focal points: Outside-out, outside-in, inside-out. In this context these modes correspond with, respectively: an act of criminalization, a process of censorship, and an intervention in social mobility. It concludes that the method of tracing one’s encounters with limits allows for the construction of an archive of one’s ways of relating to the field of study, as well as one’s own processes of knowledge formation. This method facilitates the tracing of where and how one affects and is affected, making it easier to keep track of moments of discovery, and more difficult to forget one’s positionality. Thereby, it affords the potential for more ethical research practices. 
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| The Syntax of Social Movements: Jam, Boxes and other Anti-Mafia Assemblages This contribution calls attention to the values of assemblage thinking for the study of contentious economies. A syntactical perspective can make visible social arrangements that are otherwise difficult to represent in traditional social movement categories. With the help of a jar of jam, an object that has meaningful entanglements in anti-camorra activism in Campania (Italy), the article begins by empirically illustrating instances of mobilisation that disrupt relationships of mafia dependency. The focus lies on the force of composition, the syntax of contention. The second section moves on to explore the theoretical backdrop of the analysis, and does so by suggesting some possible points of dialogue between social movement studies and assemblage thinking. These are the themes of network, conflict and identity. In various ways, assemblage thinking might be seen as diametrically opposite to many movement theories. However, these traditions share many interests: both are essentially concerned with grasping how different orders come to be, what makes them last and what makes them fall apart. Despite these similarities, these two traditions have not spoken systematically to each other. As divergences in social movement studies have significantly revolved around hierarchies (i.e. do political opportunities, personal gains or culture matter most to movement development?), I conclude by suggesting that assemblage approaches might have something to offer: they shift the perspective from ‘what matters most’ to ‘how it comes to matter.’ |
| Performativity and grassroots politics: On the practice of reshuffling mafia power Recent uses of performativity have been engaged with bridging the gap between the economy and politics. The concept of performation has for instance been used to enable discursive and material assemblages that challenge this dichotomy, with the general aim of transforming the economy. While the overall intent of this article is to contribute to this bridging, its direction of travel is the opposite: to bring the economy into politics. Specifically, it situates the notion of performativity within studies on grassroots politics in a material sense. First, it discusses some of the leading scholarship on grassroots movements, focusing on their take on the economy. It moves on to suggest that some of the problems that are identified can be addressed using performativity theory, the benefits of which are discussed in the second part. Finally, it empirically illustrates the theoretical discussion by analysing the performativity of the discourses, things and people that are jointly fighting the Mafia today. The article places social movement studies in dialogue with scholarship which is preoccupied with the economic-political cleft, in order to encourage thinking of the economy as a space for political possibility and social struggle, rather than seeing it as a place of capitalocentrism, structural exploitation and inescapability. |
| From marching for change to producing the change: reconstructions of the Italian anti-mafia movement The article discusses the shifts in Italian anti-mafia activism from its origins in the nineteenth century to today. The claims, the modes of action and the actors involved have in factvariedconcurrently with the metamorphosis of the mafia, the Italian state and society. Previous waves of anti-mafia protestwere prevalently class-based and often followed the massacre of heroes who stood up to corruption. On the other hand today’s panorama is characterised by a growing number of civil society organisations thatare producing commercial products which contrast the mafia economy through thecreation of an alternative market. The analyses draw on existing literature and on myown qualitative data collected from May-September 2014. The concluding remarks reflect on the shape that anti-mafia activism takeswithin the capitalist market economy. |
