LAUSR

The Economic Geographies of Organized Crime by Tim Hall is a magisterial, wellstructured, extended review of and meditation on the literature on organized crime, and its relation to economic geography. At the heart of the book is an attempt to address a problem: geographers have had relatively little to say about organized crime or, Hall notes, illicit economic activities in general. The result is a vast realm of economic activity that is little studied, and even less understood. One way to understand the economic geographies of organized crime is to think about different types of criminal activities, and indeed, Hall begins the book with a survey of different types of organized crime around the world, from money laundering to drug trafficking to people smuggling. While there are some types of organized crime that are truly predatory—maritime piracy would be such a case—most organized criminal activities are responding to demand. From an economic geographic perspective, the question becomes who has the demand for a particular type of organized criminal activity (and perhaps why there is demand despite illegality), where buyers are located (and where suppliers for that demand are located), how organized criminals get their goods from suppliers to buyers, what tools and environments they need to be successful, and how their activities are regulated. While better conceptualization is required, one can immediately see two problems. First, no doubt much of the lack of attention by geographers toward organized crime is because of a paucity of data and, more generally, a not wholly incorrect assumption that much about organized crime is unknowable. However, as Hall points out, organized crime in many developing country contexts is less about illegality and secrecy than informality, and less about the absence of state governance than an alternative form of governance. And indeed, one of the most valuable sections of the book is a chapter surveying the various ways in which researchers have attempted to collect data or otherwise produce knowledge of organized crime. Second, one of the main problems in conceptualizing organized crime is that it is geographically complex, multiscalar, and illicit; traditional economic geographic frameworks, such as global production networks, thus do not do well in fully describing organized crime. While Hall’s goal in the book is not to create an overarching theory, the main answer he has to this conceptualization problem is to emphasize the relatively flat, networked nature of organized crime, particularly transnational crime that extends across physical distance, and must deal with different state jurisdictions, ethnicities, and cultures. Globalization, the driving concept behind so many conceptual frameworks of legitimate commercial networks, has an ambivalent relationship with illicit commercial networks, which is a subtext running through the book. Organized criminals are liable to be shaped by globalizing and homogenizing forces and, in turn, shape those forces differently based on what they are trying to accomplish. Mafias that provide protection, contract enforcement, and dispute resolution in the absence of a state that is willing or able to do so are necessarily rooted in place and (often) ethnicity. They are only BO O K R EV EW