JONNY STEINBERG: Mafia-like groups fill the holes where SA’s fabric is tearing
01 September 2022 - 12:46
Carol Paton’s powerful reportage a fortnight ago in Fin24 on SA’s construction mafia left me both admiring and beguiled. Admiring because it is outstanding work — its reporting rigorous, its analysis trenchant. Beguiled because her narrative echoes one of the most influential accounts of the rise of the modern European state.
In 1985, sociologist Charles Tilly published an essay titled “War Making and State Making as Organised Crime”. It argues that European states as we know them were created by armed thugs demanding protection money from capitalists...
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