The Mafia and al-Qaeda: Violent and SecretiveOrganizations in Comparative and HistoricalPerspective
ABSTRACT In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we circulated an essay outlining possible comparisons between the 1980s and
1990s repression of organized crime in Italy and Sicily and the pending repression of the al-Qaeda network. Distributed in several countries,
and as a contribution to the Anthropological Quarterly's reflections on September 11, the essay elicited critical and provocative commentary.
Respondents questioned, in particular, our neglect of abuses of civil liberties in the antimafia process, our implied conflation of racketeering
with religious extremism, and our positive assessment of the role of citizens' social movements in delegitimating terrorist violence. In this ar-
ticle, we address these and related criticisms, in part through expanding and clarifying the original argument. Our premise at the time, that
the rhetoric (and pursuit) of a "war" on terrorism distorts what should be framed as a repressive action against a cellular and networked,
violent and secretive organization, is reinforced. [Keywords: criminal networks, mafia, social movements, Cold War, revenge]
IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING Septembei 11, we wroteand shaied with colleagues a brief essay reflecting on
parallels that might be drawn between the struggle againstorganized crime in Italy and Sicily—the subject of our col-laboiative leseaich since the late 1980s—and possible le-sponses to the attacks on the World Trade CenteT and Pen-tagon. No claim was made foT a piecise analogy betweenthe mafia and al-Qaeda; the ladical religious ideology ofthe latter would appeal to set it apart. In the spirit of learn-ing from comparisons, however, we believe that the twophenomena (organized brigands and pirates might be otherexamples) have some attributes in common: their cellularand networked structures extending across national bounda-ries; their high level of energy, fed by sentiments of re-venge; their sponsorship by states or elements of states;their parasitic revenue streams from licit and illicit com-merce; and their tendency toward extraordinary violencein some historical moments, provoking a determined, andgenerally publicly supported, "crackdown," For the sake ofconvenience, we have conceptualized such formations as"violent, secretive organizations, The present article revis-its that comparison in the light of reactions to it.
MAFIA FORMATION—A THUMBNAIL SKETCH
Antecedents of the Sicilian mafia lie in the early 19th cen-tury when the Neapolitan Bourbons, then rulers of Sicily,
attempted to abolish feudalism, create a land market, andenclose common holdings. The northern Italians, who or-chestrated the unification of Italy in 1860, having neitherthe knowledge, interest, nor patience to cope with the re-sulting dislocations, governed indirectly through the mostpowerful, and often the most rapacious, landowners (Fen-tress 2000, Riall 1998). Bandits roamed the countryside,and these landowners, vulnerable to theft and kidnap-ping, employed some of them for protection, Mafiosiarose from the interstices of this situation, among an in-cipient entrepreneurial class of cart drivers, muleteers,itinerant merchants, bandits, and shepherds, Recruited bygentry and noble estate owners as guards, rentiers, and all-around henchmen, they claimed to restore order, point-edly condemning kidnapping, the bandit practice thatelites most abhorred, And yet, these figures could also be asource of disorder, going beyond protecting property toextorting property holders. Extortion backed by violenceand the menace of violence became their modus vivendi(Fentress 2000; Lupo 1993; Pezzino 1995),
Clearly, had the nascent Italian state been motivatedto create institutions of order in Sicily, the mafiosi, who"protected" property, would have been redundant, Nordid the state restrict their ad hoc use of violence, To thecontrary, a succession of governing regimes in Italy lookedthe other way as mafia sodalities proliferated, especially
Schneider and Schneider • The Mafia and al-Qaeda 777
along the "bandit corridor" that extended through Sicily'swestern mountains, and in the commercially rich orcharddistrict surrounding Palermo (Lupo 1990, 1993). This tol-erant stance was leversed by the Fascists in the 1930s, butthe occupying military government that followed the Al-lied invasion of Sicily during World War II turned to influ-ential landowners for advice, and mafiosi with whomthese elites had connections weie allowed to leemeige. Inthe fiist yeais of the postwar Italian Republic, the mafia,now restored, protected the landed elite from a new waveof banditry and peasant pTOtest, intimidating and evenmurdering peasant leaders, foT the most part with impu-nity (Lupo 1997; Paoli 1997:282; Santino 1997, 2000),
In 1950, a land Tefoim was enacted, but, by this time,mafiosi were offering electoral suppoit to the centrist po-litical parties and candidates, above all, the ChristianDemocrats, as a bulwark against the electoral potential ofEurope's largest communist party, the Communist Partyof Italy, In exchange, the mafia enjoyed relative immunityfrom prosecution and onerous jail terms, and the nullaosta (green light) to penetrate the land reform administra-tion, urban produce markets, and new building construc-tion and public works in the major cities (Chubb 1982;della Porta and Vannucci 1994; Lupo 1993:175; Santinoand La Fiura 1990:366-391, 455-463). The state's failureto prevent the Sicilian mafia from taking over the globaltraffic in heroin in the 1970s was the most infamous out-come of what many refer to as that "wicked deal" (Ministryof the Interior 1994; Paoli 1996, 1997; Renda 1987; Rossetti1994), The United States, it should be noted, helped setthe parameters for this approach to the Italian Commu-nist Party, combining covert funding of the ChristianDemocrats with threats to withhold Marshall Plan funds ifthe Communists were permitted to win national elections(Ginsborg 1990:100-101, 146-152),
Intense conflict over new urban opportunities anddrugs led to the insurgence, between 1979 and 1983, of aparticularly aggressive group of mafiosi fTom the interiortown of Corleone, known as the Corleonesi, Feeling ex-cluded from Palermo's postwar real estate and constructionboom (on which bosses in the city's immediate peripheryhad seized), and apprehensive about being disrespected asjunior partners in drug deals (also initially dominated bythe Palermo "families"), they launched a series of kidnap-pings for ransom, committed without the approval of thePalermo groups and against the mafia's own rules, The tar-gets of these kidnappings included not only rich men butalso several construction impresarios who were closely alliedwith the Palermo bosses (Paoli 1997:141-158, 231-253;Pezzino 1995:256-268; Stille 1995),
On the offensive, the Corleonesi pursued a scalata, orrise to power, in which they assassinated many of thesebosses, and prevented several of the bodies from ever be-ing found, More audaciously, they turned their fire on po-lice officers, magistrates, and public officials, By means ofsavage bombings in 1992, they massacred two of the mostimportant antimafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and
Paolo Borsellino, destabilizing the st.ite and sowing terror.Two bomb blasts of artistic monuments, one in Rome andthe other in Florence, are attributed to them, as are bomb-ings in Milan, Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the power-crazed ar-chitect of these deeds, is widely known as "the Beast" inSicily; his affiliate of long standing, Giovanni Brusca, fromthe mountain town of San Giuseppe lato, goes by the nick-name "Butcher." Brusca personally detonated the chargethat blew up Falcone, his wife, and their police escort, andis notorious, as well, for strangling the young son of a jus-tice collaborator, and dissolving the body in a vat of acid(Brusca in Lodato 1999; Lupo 1993:207-214, Schneiderand Schneider in press; Stille 1995),
PROPOSED RELEVANCE OF ANTIMAFIA FORANTITERRORISM
Responding to the mafia's intensification of violence duringthe "long 1980s,' a Sicilian and Italian antimafia strugglehas unfolded, successfully curtailing, if not eliminating,the destabilizing impact of organized crime, The main fac-ets of this struggle are stepped-up investigations into ma-fia activities and their sources of funding, and direct chal-lenges to the state's complicity in mafia-related activities,
Police and judicial investigations have proceeded bytracing the movement of funds and (borrowing from the1970s prosecution of political terrorists in Italy) by turningsome two hundred mafiosi (out of roughly five thousand)into "justice collaborators,' Although leading magistratesand police inspectors lost their lives in the effort, they wereable to produce an astonishing body of new knowledge ina short period of time. Once shrouded in mystery, thecontours of the mafia's organization and the dynamics ofits internal conflicts are now amenable to sociological analy-sis, advancing the collection and interpretation of evidence,and enabling the capture of at least some fugitives,
On a second, political front, the antimafia strugglehas challenged the Italian state, especially its centrist po-litical parties, for having harbored—given aid and comfortto—the mafia. The struggle, however, did not proceedthrough demonizing the state per se. Antimafia reformers,adopting the felicitous expression, "pieces of the state,"have attempted to identify and shore up government offi-cials committed to transparency while demanding the re-moval of officials whose actions were complicitous, Al-though drawing the line is far from straightforward, notleast because the reformers hail from a variety of politicalpersuasions and interests, a sea change has occurred, inwhich doing favors for mafiosi has ceased to be an every-day affair and is now defined as illegal and immoral, Asimilar shift is underway in other institutions—the banks,the church, the health-care system, the unions, and theuniversity—all arenas where reformers have found eachother and sought to expose clientelistic practices and cor-ruption,
The movimento antimafia, a citizens' social movement,has sustained these efforts, Catalyzed by each episode of
778 American Anthropologist • Vol. 104, No, 3 • September 2002
terroT, its constituent groups organized public demonstra-tions, They also poured energy into volunteer work, suchas promoting values of democracy and civility in the pub-lic schools, What is important to appreciate about thismovement, we argued, is the dilemma experienced by theparticipants, who shaie both location and history with themafia, Dedicated to the antimafia struggle, activists arealso loyal to their Sicilian identity, and in some cases bur-dened by a past of ambiguous social relations with peopleclose to mafiosi, The resulting moial anguish has beeneven moie troubling because "Sicilians" are so often treatedas a stigmatized category by the wider world.
Antimafia activists in Sicily have coped with their an-guish and Temained committed, Sicily today is a remarkablydifferent place—changed in ways that no one thoughtpossible a decade and a half ago, At the same time, how-ever, many people sense that the gains could be reversed,or not sustained, in part because (although it unfolded ona broad front) the antimafia struggle never adequately ad-dressed the deeply rooted problems of poverty and unem-ployment, which inspire mafia support, If anything, themovement's economic impact, particularly on the con-struction industry in the major cities, made these prob-lems worse, so much so that the graffito "Viva la mafia!"has reappeared in poor neighborhoods,
Looking ahead to the struggle against al-Qaeda, wetentatively outlined four prescriptions for understandingand fighting organized crime based on the above, First, weshould anticipate, support, and expect to learn from theinspired efforts of police officers and prosecutors from dif-ferent countries as they collaborate to follow the dirtymoney, "turn" witnesses, and uncover evidence of crimi-nality, Second, we should expect that state support of vio-lent and secretive organizations is not unitary—that piecesof many states play or have played a role, This way ofthinking about the connective web of sponsorship enablesus to assimilate the embarrassing fact that pieces of theUnited States government facilitated the formation of theal-Qaeda organization during the Soviet invasion of Af-ghanistan, Responsibilities are multiple, and need to beshared. Third, citizens' movements against violence, andfor transparency and democracy, will emerge—have al-ready emerged—in many Muslim countries and in Muslimimmigrant and exile communities around the world, Notonly are these movements critical to the struggle; but alsorecognizing them and crediting them can help to contra-dict representations of Muslims as terrorists in Westernpopular discourse, which, in turn, can contribute to easingthe burden that Muslim antiterrorists bear, And, finally,the world struggle against poverty and desperation is inte-gral to the struggle against al-Qaeda—it cannot be a secon-dary concern, set aside until the emergency is over,
RESPONSES AND FURTHER THINKING
Our previous essay provoked a number of useful chal-lenges and criticisms, One reader perceptively questioned
our emphasis on police and investigative work, We ought,indeed, to have referenced the controversies over civil lib-erties that have plagued the antimafia process in Italy andSicily, A 1982 law, passed just after the assassination ofPalermo prefect and antimafia leader Carlo Alberto dallaChiesa, defines membership in the mafia as itself a crime,Thereby empowered, Sicilian magistrates have prosecutedmafiosi en masse, beginning with the spectacular maxi-trial" of 1986 in which over 450 men were tried in a spe-cially constructed bunker-courthouse inside Palermo's oldBourbon prison, The evidence presented at that trial camefrom multiple sources, including the stunning accounts ofthe first collaborators, Compelling beyond expectations, itled to the conviction of some 344 defendants, most of theconvictions being sustained on appeal, Yet there is an on-going debate about the potential for guilt by association insuch a procedure, and especially about the role of "turn-coat" witnesses, The irony is that the same arguments fordue process and guarantees of individual protections areemployed by civil libertarians and by noted apologists forthe earlier corrupt nexus of the mafia and politics, More-over, among the most vociferous defenders of civil liber-ties in Italy have been supporters of the present primeminister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is himself under indict-ment for acts of economic and political malfeasance,There is no easy answer to this dilemma, short of alert citi-zens holding prosecutors to a high standard of fairnessand "the rule of law" (see Jamieson 2000; Schneider andSchneider 1998),
Several respondents to the essay questioned the ap-propriateness of the mafia analogy to al-Qaeda, primarilybecause al-Qaeda is an organization of religious extrem-ists—an "army of God" in the words of one—evokingcommitments and motivations that are radically at oddswith the greed for money and status that drives racketeersand drug dealers, There is also a marked difference in scalebetween the two organizations,
In our view, although these contrasts are significant,two aspects of the mafia mitigate them to some extent,One is the structural parallel to al-Qaeda's transnationallynetworked "cells, In addition to Sicilian rural towns andurban neighborhoods, immigrant communities in theAmericas, Australia, northern Italy, and Europe have longbeen sites for the formation of cosche (local-level fraternalsodalities, the mafia's metaphorical, male-only "families"),Apart from the kinship, friendship, and godparenthoodrelations that link individual Sicilian mafiosi to mafiosi onother continents, there are cooperative, if not fully trust-ing, social ties that are readily produced through the mu-tual recognition of belonging to groups with similar crite-ria of selectivity, etiquette, lexicon, and ritual practice,These ties—both the preexisting ones and the newly mintedones—have been of great strategic advantage in expand-ing the mafia's revenue stream, above all through moneylaundering and trafficking in drugs, Although we knowmuch less about al-Qaeda, we might imagine that it simi-larly produces the kind of mutually recognized fraternal
Schneider and Schneider • The Mafia and al-Qaeda 779
bonds that facilitate seaet planning across vast distancesfor violent or illegal operations,
Further supporting the analogy to al-Qaeda is the ex-tent to which mafiosi are motivated by revenge as well asgreed, Preying on all levels of society, they representthemselves as "men of honor" exacting justice without re-sort to the (manifestly unfair) state, A charter myth in thefoim of an influential novel, / Beati Paoli (The BlessedPaulists) (1984) has perpetuated this claim, Published in1908, it narrates the adventures of an 18th-century secietsociety of giustizieri (vigilantes) who staged trials and exe-cuted sentences in tunnels undeT Palermo. In mafia ideol-ogy, such "ministers of justice" eschew theiT own, privateinterests, being guided by spiritual foTces to vindicate evildeeds (SchneideT and SchneideT in pTess),
In recent times, the exceptionally aggiessive Coileo-nisi faction of the mafia Teevoked precisely the themes ofequity and Tevenge in theiT assault on the Palermo bosses.In his unsettling book, / Killed Giovanni Falcone (writtenwith a journalist's collaboration, see Lodato 1999), GiovanniBrusca makes invidious comparisons between the bosseslike himself from the mountain towns and the bosses ofPalermo and its surrounds, The leaders of his faction smol-dered at the disrespect shown them by the Palermo-basedbosses; "they considered [us] small town folks rustic(hicks), not presentable in (polite) society'' (Brusca in Lo-dato 1999:50, 53), In Brusca's mind, anger at being margi-nalized from the modern Palermo economy and society le-gitimated the bloody Corleonesi takeover. Perhaps notsurprisingly, as the Corleonesi became major drug traffick-ers, they established a "schedule of dockings" so that eachcoalition of traffickers would have access to shipments ona rotating basis, Using their drug profits to capitalize smallconstruction firms, they even engaged a "business planner"to pilot bidding on public works contracts so as to takecare of as many young and "hungry" followers as possible(Schneider and Schneider in press), This intertwining ofaggression and an ideology of equity—murder and retribu-tive justice—seems to us characteristic of violent and se-cretive organizations, whether mafiosi or al-Qaeda,
Another set of questions concerns the role we pro-posed for citizens' social movements advocating democ-racy and transparency, denouncing violence and corrup-tion. Although we did not say so explicitly, several readersdetected that the antimafia movement in Palermo is pro-pelled largely by members of the urban and educated mid-dle classes, with a significant participation of women andan overall bow to gender equality (see Schneider andSchneider 2001, in press), We have been asked, Are "civilsociety" mobilizations of this sort a likely occurrence inthe Muslim world? One answer is that, in the eyes ofmany, Sicily was also an unlikely site for such a move-ment, having long been characterized as a deeply patriar-chal, clientelistic "honor and shame" society, incapable ofgenerating a civic culture, As exemplified by Robert Put-nam's widely cited book, Making Democracy Work: CivicTraditions in Modern Italy (1993), social scientists easily
miss the extent of the contradictory fortes brewing behindthe scenes, Although published during the very years thatthe antimafia movement flourished, the book depicts south-ern Italians and Sicilians as lacking civil consensus, publicfaith, or any "spirit of association" (a condition argued todate to the 13th century) (Putnam 1993:123-130; see alsoSchneider 1998),
As an antidote to stereotypes of this kind, it helps toreconstruct the interplay of conflictual forces over time. Inthe late 1970s through the early 1990s, the mafia becamemonstrous—significantly more violent and threateningthan it had been before. People who had earlier toleratedits presence because it contributed to a kind of social peace—a quieto vivere—declared they had had enough, Basta! wasthe mobilizing cry of the reformers, In other words, theappearance of complicity with a violent and secretive or-ganization may be misleading, We should not be surprisedif variously located Muslim reformers, newly awaTe thatsecretive "cells" have become engaged in a shocking esca-lation of aggrandizing violence, articulate a similar mes-sage, and seek to create a broader, middle ground.
Authoritarian regimes may, of course, stifle such initia-tives, and it is a problem that the United States appears tosupport such regimes in several Muslim countries, A similardifficulty also occurred in the ostensibly Western democ-racy of Italy, Until the collapse of the First Italian Republic in1992, in fact, angry Sicilians wanted to know what sort ofa democracy consistently reinstated the same political cur-rents with the help of mafia votes. As Alison Jamieson haswritten, "The permanence in power of the same coalitionof parties, the same party leaders and the same supportingbureaucracies, cemented into place by virtue of their anti-Communist convictions, had encouraged complacencyand a sense of superiority to the law" (2000:9).
There is another consideration, Our original essay im-plied that the world's hope for a retreat from the abyss ofSeptember 11 rests substantially on the actions of citizensin Muslim countries and communities—that we are count-ing on their groups and movements to reorient the gov-ernmental, religious, and educational institutions thathave, it is believed, lent support to al-Qaeda, But this for-mulation overlooks the responsibility of citizens every-where to address their institutions. In the spirit of the anti-mafia movement in Sicily, we ask what Americans—Muslimand otherwise—might be able to do to lessen the likeli-hood that their government's involvements abroad willnourish new monsters. Initiate actions to conserve energy(reducing dependence on foreign oil)? Press for demandreduction, decriminalization, and treatment programs asan alternative to the "war" on drugs? Support projects foreconomic justice at home and abroad? Monitor and speakout about abuses of civil liberties? Open a debate aboutmilitarization in light of the transformed nature of war, inwhich civilians are increasingly far more vulnerable thancombatants?
780 American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No, 3 • September 2002
WARS—HOT AND COLD
The opening observation of OUT earlier essay was that Sicil-ians consistently lefer to the lecent ciackdown on organ-ized dime as the lotta contro la mafia (the struggle, againstthe mafia), eschewing a language of "war." In extrapolat-ing to the ciackdown on al-Qaeda, we recognized thatmilitary actions might be necessaiy but aigued that theoveiall undertaking should nevertheless be conceptualizedas a campaign or stTUggle, TatheT than a waT, carried onthiough international intelligence gathering, police ac-tion, and prosecution in international tribunals, Such acampaign would optimally enjoy the support of citizens'groups as well as states. The argument against the rhetoricof war met with robust agreement across the admittedlyskewed sample of people responding to the essay, al-though one person observed, wryly, that while the word"struggle' is comfortable to Europeans, many Americansassociate it with the kinds of labor and revolutionarystruggles" that they distrust. Regardless, the possibility
for turning the United States's national discourse awayfrom "war" has narrowed because of what is claimed to bethe successful, and from many perspectives welcome, mili-tary action against the Taliban regime.
And yet, such an effort remains urgent, As several re-spondents pointed out, the political rhetoric of a genericand global "war on terrorism" all too readily legitimatesthe deployment by various regimes of well-armed policeand military units against whatever oppositional voiceswould threaten or embarrass their power. What is morefrightening is that it has recently appeared to pave theway for a U.S. war against Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, de-fined as the "evil axis, Even if this hot war should notcome to pass, the rhetoric of a U.S.-led war on terrorismconjures up a return to the half-century during which theUnited States, in the guise of the Cold War, achieved im-perial dominance, referred to as "the triumph of globaliza-tion" or "lone super-power status, As many would argue,the Cold War was won through a combination of diplo-macy, economic might, and arming proxy states and sub-states all over the globe, Bill Keller, in a New York TimesOp-Ed piece on October 6, 2001, points out the downsideof this: In a cold war "collateral damage means more thanthe civilians who perish in the path of your air strikes, Itmeans how much you sully yourself by empowering uglyregimes in the name of common struggle, how much youcompromise your freedom in the name of security, howmuch you undermine public trust through lies and patri-otic-sounding cant.
EMPOWERING UNSAVORY BEDFELLOWS
There is yet another problem. Armed by empires in theirclimb to supremacy, unsavory bedfellows gain power andbecome dangerous on their own terms. Nothing makesthis point better than the prehistory of al-Qaeda. As isnow widely acknowledged, beginning in the Carter ad-ministration, it was U.S. policy to arm guerilla movements
fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan,but in a way that would allow the United States to denysuch support. Carter's successor, Reagan, reinforced this(deniable) sponsorship in order to lure the Soviet Unioninto an ever more costly Afghan war, Although the CIAnegotiated the arms transfers, it did so with the full con-sent of Congress; the covert actor in this case was Paki-stan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or 1SI, which, inthe words of a recent analysis of gun running, "demandedand received control over the arms pipeline and thechoice of recipients as a precondition for that country'shelp in channeling weapons to the mujahideen" (Mathiakand Lumpe 2000:61; see also Bergen 2001:66),
Between 1979 and 1989, the 1SI took in two billiondollars worth of weapons, amounting to 80 percent of itsbudget for covert aid and including, after 1986, handheldStinger missiles. Keeping a large portion of this windfallfor itself, it distributed the rest to various clients (Mathiakand Lumpe 2000:61; Bergen 2001:68 gives the figure ofthree billion dollars), Primary recipients on the Afghanend were the Peshawar-based, pro-Pakistan groups led byGulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burnhanuddin Rabbani, Ad-herents of extreme Islamism, both had alliances with Arabimmigrants gravitating to the anti-Soviet "jihad," Hek-matyar was also heavily engaged in opium trafficking,Narco-profits and stockpiled weapons would sustain thesegroups and their Arab Afghan allies in future combat, longafter American support had been withdrawn (Bergen2001:64-65),
Journalist Peter Bergen offers a measured, well-docu-mented analysis of what is colloquially referred to as the"blowback" from this CIA sponsorship, By the mid-1980s,he argues, the United States should have foreseen the dis-astrous implications of funding the Afghan insurgencythrough the 1SI: Doing so inflated the military capabilitynot only of this covert actor but also of power-crazed relig-ious fanatics with axes to grind in Afghanistan and abroad(Bergen 2001:67), Conveniently, in the early 1990s, al-Qaeda set up its training camps on the turf of Hekmatyar'sgroup, the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan. In otherwords, "the troubling legacy of the Afghan war against thecommunists ended up creating a transnational force ofIslamist militants who have spread terrorism and guerillamovements around the world" (Bergen 2001:75), Othersources second this assessment, In the end, say arms-con-trol experts Mathiak and Lumpe, "the secret arms supplyoperation contributed not only to an ongoing humanitar-ian crisis and to state and regional instability, but it alsostrengthened a global network of fundamentalist, viru-lently anti-Western—and in particular anti-American—terrorists" (2000:66),
If the unsavory bedfellows deployed by America in itseffort to defeat the Soviet Empire spawned a monstrouspresence, the gross dislocations of the new "globalizing"imperialism have made things worse, contributing to thegrowing capacity of terrorist groups to recruit desperatefollowers. We are reminded of an earlier moment in history
Schneider and Schneider • The Mafia and al-Qaeda 781
when competition for imperial dominance also nurtured a"stateless" criminal network that was threatening to manycountries—namely the 17th-century run-up to British im-perial supremacy, Along with the Dutch and the French,this North Atlantic power expanded its global reach through,among other things, the sponsorship of pirates. So long asthey raided Portuguese and Spanish vessels, pirate bands,recruited from the colonies as well as from Europe, wereencouraged—indeed, in the case of privateers, they were li-censed—by the English state to engage in criminal activ-ity, With time, pirate networks proliferated, and withthem a far-flung set of supportive relations in the port cit-ies of the colonies, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, the Carib-bean, the Indian Ocean, and North America sustained portswhere, in exchange for booty, pirates could find recreationand provisions,
By the early 18th century, both merchant shippingand piracy were transformed by the further expansion ofempire, as deep-water traffic in basic goods and slavesgrew in proportion to coastal traffic in luxury goods, Mer-chant ships came to resemble floating wooden prisons inwhich authoritarian captains, gratuitously exploitative,even murderously cruel, disciplined sailors recruited fromthe poorest, most marginal classes on land (see Rediker1989), Increasingly, pirates expressed the grievances ofthese sailors: In hijacking ships, they executed summaryjustice against the tyrannical ship's officers, welcomed thevengefully mutinous crew members into their fold, and ri-oted against the authorities who sought to intervene, Self-help justice and equity were their watchwords; skeletonsadorned their flags, A demobilization of sailors under armsfollowing the conclusion of England's military confronta-tions with Spain meant additional manpower for piracy.
In 1720, a decision was made to launch a forceful"crackdown" on this increasingly unruly and threateningforce, Officers and colonial officials arrested and executedperhaps five hundred pirates in ports around the world,displaying their bodies as object lessons in gruesome pub-lic hangings (Rediker 1989:283). Significantly, in each ofthe port cities where trials and hangings occurred, citizensparticipated approvingly, as did religious authorities andpublicists who shaped opinion on "cleansing" the seas ofpiracy, notwithstanding these cities' easy transactionswith pirates in an earlier time (Rediker 1989:285), In thewords of Marcus Rediker, whose account we have been fol-lowing, the pirates ultimately had "a fragile social world,They produced nothing and had no secure place in theeconomic order. They had no nation, no home; they werewidely dispersed; their community had virtually no geo-graphic boundaries, These deficiencies of social organi-zation made them, in the long run, relatively easy prey"(1989:285; see also Richie 1986).
Pirates did not wholly disappear, Today indeed theyare back with a vengeance, operating out of ports in outly-ing islands of Southeast Asia and preying on containerships (Steinberg 2001), In the short run, moreover, theywere locked in a reciprocal reign of terror with the English
state and its allies. All told, the pirates of the early 18thcentury seem noteworthy for having erupted from an en-demic condition into a virulent and threatening challengeto the international "order"' even while they had beennurtured by a rising empire (that then felt compelled tosuppress them).
The al-Qaeda network has been defined by the fanati-cal religious commitment of its adherents, their hostilityto secular states, and this tempts some to assimilate it toIslamism, if not Islam, Our argument is that it is morefruitfully understood as a violent and secretive organiza-tion that, like the mafia, benefited from some reckless andill-considered acts of sponsorship, proffered by parts ofmany institutions and states, Its vengeful energy has beenamplified by the dislocations of globalization, If it can beinvestigated and its members prosecuted, tried, and pun-ished, the world will be a safer place, Neutralizing theforces that amplify such a phenomenon is another story,completely intertwined with those bigger struggles for aworld that is more equitable and just. In neither case doesthe expression "global war on terrorism" capture what isat stake, More seriously, such war talk risks deeply alienat-ing the citizens of the planet on whom successful intelli-gence gathering, prosecution, and moves toward justiceand equity depend.
JANE SCHNEIDER Department of Anthropology, Graduate
Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016PETER SCHNEIDER Department of Sociology, Fordham Univer-
sity, New York, NY 10023
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