Crimilegal Orders, Governance and Armed Conflict

"A major contribution to the literature. The book adds an important facet to the discourse on organized crime and illegal governance."

-Klaus von Lampe, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, USA

"Markus Schultze-Kraft's impressive new book on crimilegal orders explores the interface between politics, organised crime and violence and develops a theoretically sophisticated analysis of how state legality works and for whom in a globalised world."

-Robin Luckham, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK

"This is an important book that makes an excellent contribution to understanding how criminality affects governance."

-Paul Jackson, International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK

"Schultze-Kraft's efforts to demystify the grey zones of the 'crimilegal order' are illuminating and will be invaluable for scholars."

-Ivan Briscoe, International Crisis Group, Colombia

Comprehensively laying out the concept of crimilegality, this book presents a novel perspective on the relationship between what is conventionally termed organised crime and political order in the contemporary developing world. In hybrid crimilegal orders the moral, normative and social boundaries between legality and illegality-criminality are blurred, and through the violation of the official law, the illegal-criminal sphere of social life becomes legitimate and morally acceptable, while the legal turns illegitimate and immoral. Several examples of crimilegality and crimilegal governance in Colombia and Nigeria, including in relation to armed conflict termination, are used to illustrate these complex processes.

Markus Schultze-Kraft is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Universidad Icesi, Colombia.