Archives for Mafia

Following the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic in March, Italy was one of the first countries to implement extreme measures in an attempt to contain the drastic impact of the pandemic. With the domestic health system on the verge of collapse, restrictions to movement were imposed across the…

Territorial control is a crucial activity for many criminal organisations. Italian mafias, in particular, consider the territory they originate from as a crucial resource. It is the place they wield an extra-legal political authority, recruit members, extort illegal tributes, and operate as brokers within the local community. While globalisation has increasingly…

On the 4th of February 1991, Mario Tamburrino was unloading barrels from his truck when a life-changing accident occurred: the truck driver was transporting 571 industrial barrels with toxic waste from Piedmont in Northern Italy to Naples in the South when some of the liquid inside came into contact with his eyes.…

Robert Putnam’s Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, published in the early 1990s, is one of the most influential books in comparative politics. The book sought to investigate what factors contribute to good governance, and used Italy’s regional north–south divide to do so. Putnam’s conclusion was that good…

“Anyone who is deaf, blind and dumb will live a hundred years in peace.” So reads the proverb in the book penned by the Sicilian ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè. Conjuring the fundamental principle of omertà (code of silence), this proverb highlights the historical importance of remaining indifferent to injustice in Sicily.…