Hi Brian, Jackie Dugard did a Cambridge University PhD on informal economy and violence in post-apartheid South Africa a few years back. It was specifically about the 'taxi wars' in Johannesburg/Pretoria and Cape Town, armed conflict between gangs for control of the minibus passenger transport industry. She starts off by tracing the informalisation of violence to the state apparatus in the late apartheid era. But the efforts of the post-apartheid state to deal with the problem failed because bureaucrats were so much slower and more rigid than gangsters. This is not news, I think.
The Rand Corporation produced a report not long ago 'Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy" that has chapters like 'Transnational Criminal Networks' and 'Gangs, Hooligans, and Anarchists - the Vanguard of Netwar in the Streets'. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/ Its conclusion, as I recall, was that the future lies with flexible network organization and the governments and corporations will go down unless they find a way for transforming themselves into something like their opponents. But that has been a persistent twentieth century tactic, hasn't it, from British government terrorism in Ireland at the time of Ken Loach's latest movie to the lawlessness openly embraced by the Bush regime today and John Perkins' revelations about his career as an 'economic hitman' for the corporations. So I guess one question might be whether something new is going on here? Maybe it's the dissemination of news through these media. Keith # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
