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
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