Social Dimensions of Organised Crime (Book Review)

This book brings together the most important results of the GLODERS project which stands for Global Dynamics of Extortion Rackets. GLODERS was extraordinarily complex in combining innovative computational modelling, new judicial data sources from stakeholders, and usage of qualitative and narrative data with the aim of understanding the dynamics of extortion racket systems. The three editors – Corinna Elsenbroich, David Anzola and Nigel Gilbert – deserve highest praise and congratulations on pulling it all together, as anyone who has been involved in such complex, interdisciplinary and multi-national projects will certainly acknowledge. The project aimed at capturing the interaction between a criminal group of extortionists, civil society, which in this context means the victims of extortion and consumers, and the state represented by its judicial system. Its theoretical foundation and focus is on the normative patterns that drive and sustain such extortion racket systems; norms are embodied in the models proper and further explored through survey data on normative orientations, e.g. towards corruption (Chapter 9). The book includes the empirical, theoretical and typological foundations of the models (Part I) and presents three types of models: an agent-based, event-oriented model (Chapter 8), a simulation model based on textual data (Chapter 10 and Chapter 11), and a run of experiments that aims at capturing the different time periods of extortion racketeering, civil society, and judicial responses in Southern Italy (Chapter 12). All models are based on novel judicial data sets from the South of Italy.