JANE SCHNEIDER PETER SCHNEIDER

The Mafia and al-Qaeda: Violent and Secretive Organizations in Comparative and Historical Perspective
ABSTRACT In the immediate aftermath of September 11, we circulated an essay outlining possible comparisons between the 1980s and

1990s repression of organized crime in Italy and Sicily and the pending repression of the al-Qaeda network. Distributed in several countries, and as a contribution to the Anthropological Quarterly's reflections on September 11, the essay elicited critical and provocative commentary. Respondents questioned, in particular, our neglect of abuses of civil liberties in the antimafia process, our implied conflation of racketeering with religious extremism, and our positive assessment of the role of citizens' social movements in delegitimating terrorist violence. In this article, we address these and related criticisms, in part through expanding and clarifying the original argument. Our premise at the time, that the rhetoric (and pursuit) of a "war" on terrorism distorts what should be framed as a repressive action against a cellular and networked, violent and secretive organization, is reinforced. [Keywords: criminal networks, mafia, social movements, Cold War, revenge]

N THE DAYS FOLLOWING Septembei 11, we wrote and shaied with colleagues a brief essay reflecting on parallels that might be drawn between the struggle against organized crime in Italy and Sicilythe subject of our collaboiative leseaich since the late 1980sand possible lesponses to the attacks on the World Trade CenteT and Pentagon. No claim was made foT a piecise analogy between the mafia and al-Qaeda; the ladical religious ideology of the latter would appeal to set it apart. In the spirit of learning from comparisons, however, we believe that the two phenomena (organized brigands and pirates might be other examples) have some attributes in common: their cellular and networked structures extending across national boundaries; their high level of energy, fed by sentiments of revenge; their sponsorship by states or elements of states; their parasitic revenue streams from licit and illicit commerce; and their tendency toward extraordinary violence in some historical moments, provoking a determined, and generally publicly supported, "crackdown," For the sake of convenience, we have conceptualized such formations as "violent, secretive organizations, The present article revisits that comparison in the light of reactions to it.

MAFIA FORMATIONA THUMBNAIL SKETCH

Antecedents of the Sicilian mafia lie in the early 19th century when the Neapolitan Bourbons, then rulers of Sicily,

attempted to abolish feudalism, create a land market, and enclose common holdings. The northern Italians, who orchestrated the unification of Italy in 1860, having neither the knowledge, interest, nor patience to cope with the resulting dislocations, governed indirectly through the most powerful, and often the most rapacious, landowners (Fentress 2000, Riall 1998). Bandits roamed the countryside, and these landowners, vulnerable to theft and kidnapping, employed some of them for protection, Mafiosi arose from the interstices of this situation, among an incipient entrepreneurial class of cart drivers, muleteers, itinerant merchants, bandits, and shepherds, Recruited by gentry and noble estate owners as guards, rentiers, and allaround henchmen, they claimed to restore order, pointedly condemning kidnapping, the bandit practice that elites most abhorred, And yet, these figures could also be a source of disorder, going beyond protecting property to extorting property holders. Extortion backed by violence and the menace of violence became their modus vivendi (Fentress 2000; Lupo 1993; Pezzino 1995), Clearly, had the nascent Italian state been motivated to create institutions of order in Sicily, the mafiosi, who "protected" property, would have been redundant, Nor did the state restrict their ad hoc use of violence, To the contrary, a succession of governing regimes in Italy looked the other way as mafia sodalities proliferated, especially

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Schneider and Schneider The Mafia and al-Qaeda along the "bandit corridor" that extended through Sicily's western mountains, and in the commercially rich orchard district surrounding Palermo (Lupo 1990, 1993). This tolerant stance was leversed by the Fascists in the 1930s, but the occupying military government that followed the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War II turned to influential landowners for advice, and mafiosi with whom these elites had connections weie allowed to leemeige. In the fiist yeais of the postwar Italian Republic, the mafia, now restored, protected the landed elite from a new wave of banditry and peasant pTOtest, intimidating and even murdering peasant leaders, foT the most part with impunity (Lupo 1997; Paoli 1997:282; Santino 1997, 2000), In 1950, a land Tefoim was enacted, but, by this time, mafiosi were offering electoral suppoit to the centrist political parties and candidates, above all, the Christian Democrats, as a bulwark against the electoral potential of Europe's largest communist party, the Communist Party of Italy, In exchange, the mafia enjoyed relative immunity from prosecution and onerous jail terms, and the nulla osta (green light) to penetrate the land reform administration, urban produce markets, and new building construction and public works in the major cities (Chubb 1982; della Porta and Vannucci 1994; Lupo 1993:175; Santino and La Fiura 1990:366-391, 455-463). The state's failure to prevent the Sicilian mafia from taking over the global traffic in heroin in the 1970s was the most infamous outcome of what many refer to as that "wicked deal" (Ministry of the Interior 1994; Paoli 1996, 1997; Renda 1987; Rossetti 1994), The United States, it should be noted, helped set the parameters for this approach to the Italian Communist Party, combining covert funding of the Christian Democrats with threats to withhold Marshall Plan funds if the Communists were permitted to win national elections (Ginsborg 1990:100-101, 146-152), Intense conflict over new urban opportunities and drugs led to the insurgence, between 1979 and 1983, of a particularly aggressive group of mafiosi fTom the interior town of Corleone, known as the Corleonesi, Feeling excluded from Palermo's postwar real estate and construction boom (on which bosses in the city's immediate periphery had seized), and apprehensive about being disrespected as junior partners in drug deals (also initially dominated by the Palermo "families"), they launched a series of kidnappings for ransom, committed without the approval of the Palermo groups and against the mafia's own rules, The targets of these kidnappings included not only rich men but also several construction impresarios who were closely allied with the Palermo bosses (Paoli 1997:141-158, 231-253; Pezzino 1995:256-268; Stille 1995), On the offensive, the Corleonesi pursued a scalata, or rise to power, in which they assassinated many of these bosses, and prevented several of the bodies from ever being found, More audaciously, they turned their fire on police officers, magistrates, and public officials, By means of savage bombings in 1992, they massacred two of the most important antimafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and

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Paolo Borsellino, destabilizing the st.ite and sowing terror. Two bomb blasts of artistic monuments, one in Rome and the other in Florence, are attributed to them, as are bombings in Milan, Salvatore (Toto) Riina, the power-crazed architect of these deeds, is widely known as "the Beast" in Sicily; his affiliate of long standing, Giovanni Brusca, from the mountain town of San Giuseppe lato, goes by the nickname "Butcher." Brusca personally detonated the charge that blew up Falcone, his wife, and their police escort, and is notorious, as well, for strangling the young son of a justice collaborator, and dissolving the body in a vat of acid (Brusca in Lodato 1999; Lupo 1993:207-214, Schneider and Schneider in press; Stille 1995),
PROPOSED RELEVANCE OF ANTIMAFIA FOR ANTITERRORISM

Responding to the mafia's intensification of violence during the "long 1980s,' a Sicilian and Italian antimafia struggle has unfolded, successfully curtailing, if not eliminating, the destabilizing impact of organized crime, The main facets of this struggle are stepped-up investigations into mafia activities and their sources of funding, and direct challenges to the state's complicity in mafia-related activities, Police and judicial investigations have proceeded by tracing the movement of funds and (borrowing from the 1970s prosecution of political terrorists in Italy) by turning some two hundred mafiosi (out of roughly five thousand) into "justice collaborators,' Although leading magistrates and police inspectors lost their lives in the effort, they were able to produce an astonishing body of new knowledge in a short period of time. Once shrouded in mystery, the contours of the mafia's organization and the dynamics of its internal conflicts are now amenable to sociological analysis, advancing the collection and interpretation of evidence, and enabling the capture of at least some fugitives, On a second, political front, the antimafia struggle has challenged the Italian state, especially its centrist political parties, for having harboredgiven aid and comfort tothe mafia. The struggle, however, did not proceed through demonizing the state per se. Antimafia reformers, adopting the felicitous expression, "pieces of the state," have attempted to identify and shore up government officials committed to transparency while demanding the removal of officials whose actions were complicitous, Although drawing the line is far from straightforward, not least because the reformers hail from a variety of political persuasions and interests, a sea change has occurred, in which doing favors for mafiosi has ceased to be an everyday affair and is now defined as illegal and immoral, A similar shift is underway in other institutionsthe banks, the church, the health-care system, the unions, and the universityall arenas where reformers have found each other and sought to expose clientelistic practices and corruption, The movimento antimafia, a citizens' social movement, has sustained these efforts, Catalyzed by each episode of

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terroT, its constituent groups organized public demonstrations, They also poured energy into volunteer work, such as promoting values of democracy and civility in the public schools, What is important to appreciate about this movement, we argued, is the dilemma experienced by the participants, who shaie both location and history with the mafia, Dedicated to the antimafia struggle, activists are also loyal to their Sicilian identity, and in some cases burdened by a past of ambiguous social relations with people close to mafiosi, The resulting moial anguish has been even moie troubling because "Sicilians" are so often treated as a stigmatized category by the wider world. Antimafia activists in Sicily have coped with their anguish and Temained committed, Sicily today is a remarkably different placechanged in ways that no one thought possible a decade and a half ago, At the same time, however, many people sense that the gains could be reversed, or not sustained, in part because (although it unfolded on a broad front) the antimafia struggle never adequately addressed the deeply rooted problems of poverty and unemployment, which inspire mafia support, If anything, the movement's economic impact, particularly on the construction industry in the major cities, made these problems worse, so much so that the graffito "Viva la mafia!" has reappeared in poor neighborhoods, Looking ahead to the struggle against al-Qaeda, we tentatively outlined four prescriptions for understanding and fighting organized crime based on the above, First, we should anticipate, support, and expect to learn from the inspired efforts of police officers and prosecutors from different countries as they collaborate to follow the dirty money, "turn" witnesses, and uncover evidence of criminality, Second, we should expect that state support of violent and secretive organizations is not unitarythat pieces of many states play or have played a role, This way of thinking about the connective web of sponsorship enables us to assimilate the embarrassing fact that pieces of the United States government facilitated the formation of the al-Qaeda organization during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Responsibilities are multiple, and need to be shared. Third, citizens' movements against violence, and for transparency and democracy, will emergehave already emergedin many Muslim countries and in Muslim immigrant and exile communities around the world, Not only are these movements critical to the struggle; but also recognizing them and crediting them can help to contradict representations of Muslims as terrorists in Western popular discourse, which, in turn, can contribute to easing the burden that Muslim antiterrorists bear, And, finally, the world struggle against poverty and desperation is integral to the struggle against al-Qaedait cannot be a secondary concern, set aside until the emergency is over,
RESPONSES AND FURTHER THINKING

Our previous essay provoked a number of useful challenges and criticisms, One reader perceptively questioned

our emphasis on police and investigative work, We ought, indeed, to have referenced the controversies over civil liberties that have plagued the antimafia process in Italy and Sicily, A 1982 law, passed just after the assassination of Palermo prefect and antimafia leader Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, defines membership in the mafia as itself a crime, Thereby empowered, Sicilian magistrates have prosecuted mafiosi en masse, beginning with the spectacular maxitrial" of 1986 in which over 450 men were tried in a specially constructed bunker-courthouse inside Palermo's old Bourbon prison, The evidence presented at that trial came from multiple sources, including the stunning accounts of the first collaborators, Compelling beyond expectations, it led to the conviction of some 344 defendants, most of the convictions being sustained on appeal, Yet there is an ongoing debate about the potential for guilt by association in such a procedure, and especially about the role of "turncoat" witnesses, The irony is that the same arguments for due process and guarantees of individual protections are employed by civil libertarians and by noted apologists for the earlier corrupt nexus of the mafia and politics, Moreover, among the most vociferous defenders of civil liberties in Italy have been supporters of the present prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who is himself under indictment for acts of economic and political malfeasance, There is no easy answer to this dilemma, short of alert citizens holding prosecutors to a high standard of fairness and "the rule of law" (see Jamieson 2000; Schneider and Schneider 1998), Several respondents to the essay questioned the appropriateness of the mafia analogy to al-Qaeda, primarily because al-Qaeda is an organization of religious extremistsan "army of God" in the words of oneevoking commitments and motivations that are radically at odds with the greed for money and status that drives racketeers and drug dealers, There is also a marked difference in scale between the two organizations, In our view, although these contrasts are significant, two aspects of the mafia mitigate them to some extent, One is the structural parallel to al-Qaeda's transnationally networked "cells, In addition to Sicilian rural towns and urban neighborhoods, immigrant communities in the Americas, Australia, northern Italy, and Europe have long been sites for the formation of cosche (local-level fraternal sodalities, the mafia's metaphorical, male-only "families"), Apart from the kinship, friendship, and godparenthood relations that link individual Sicilian mafiosi to mafiosi on other continents, there are cooperative, if not fully trusting, social ties that are readily produced through the mutual recognition of belonging to groups with similar criteria of selectivity, etiquette, lexicon, and ritual practice, These tiesboth the preexisting ones and the newly minted oneshave been of great strategic advantage in expanding the mafia's revenue stream, above all through money laundering and trafficking in drugs, Although we know much less about al-Qaeda, we might imagine that it similarly produces the kind of mutually recognized fraternal

Schneider and Schneider The Mafia and al-Qaeda bonds that facilitate seaet planning across vast distances for violent or illegal operations, Further supporting the analogy to al-Qaeda is the extent to which mafiosi are motivated by revenge as well as greed, Preying on all levels of society, they represent themselves as "men of honor" exacting justice without resort to the (manifestly unfair) state, A charter myth in the foim of an influential novel, / Beati Paoli (The Blessed Paulists) (1984) has perpetuated this claim, Published in 1908, it narrates the adventures of an 18th-century seciet society of giustizieri (vigilantes) who staged trials and executed sentences in tunnels undeT Palermo. In mafia ideology, such "ministers of justice" eschew theiT own, private interests, being guided by spiritual foTces to vindicate evil deeds (SchneideT and SchneideT in pTess), In recent times, the exceptionally aggiessive Coileonisi faction of the mafia Teevoked precisely the themes of equity and Tevenge in theiT assault on the Palermo bosses. In his unsettling book, / Killed Giovanni Falcone (written with a journalist's collaboration, see Lodato 1999), Giovanni Brusca makes invidious comparisons between the bosses like himself from the mountain towns and the bosses of Palermo and its surrounds, The leaders of his faction smoldered at the disrespect shown them by the Palermo-based bosses; "they considered [us] small town folks rustic (hicks), not presentable in (polite) society'' (Brusca in Lodato 1999:50, 53), In Brusca's mind, anger at being marginalized from the modern Palermo economy and society legitimated the bloody Corleonesi takeover. Perhaps not surprisingly, as the Corleonesi became major drug traffickers, they established a "schedule of dockings" so that each coalition of traffickers would have access to shipments on a rotating basis, Using their drug profits to capitalize small construction firms, they even engaged a "business planner" to pilot bidding on public works contracts so as to take care of as many young and "hungry" followers as possible (Schneider and Schneider in press), This intertwining of aggression and an ideology of equitymurder and retributive justiceseems to us characteristic of violent and secretive organizations, whether mafiosi or al-Qaeda, Another set of questions concerns the role we proposed for citizens' social movements advocating democracy and transparency, denouncing violence and corruption. Although we did not say so explicitly, several readers detected that the antimafia movement in Palermo is propelled largely by members of the urban and educated middle classes, with a significant participation of women and an overall bow to gender equality (see Schneider and Schneider 2001, in press), We have been asked, Are "civil society" mobilizations of this sort a likely occurrence in the Muslim world? One answer is that, in the eyes of many, Sicily was also an unlikely site for such a movement, having long been characterized as a deeply patriarchal, clientelistic "honor and shame" society, incapable of generating a civic culture, As exemplified by Robert Putnam's widely cited book, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (1993), social scientists easily

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miss the extent of the contradictory fortes brewing behind the scenes, Although published during the very years that the antimafia movement flourished, the book depicts southern Italians and Sicilians as lacking civil consensus, public faith, or any "spirit of association" (a condition argued to date to the 13th century) (Putnam 1993:123-130; see also Schneider 1998), As an antidote to stereotypes of this kind, it helps to reconstruct the interplay of conflictual forces over time. In the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the mafia became monstroussignificantly more violent and threatening than it had been before. People who had earlier tolerated its presence because it contributed to a kind of social peace a quieto viveredeclared they had had enough, Basta! was the mobilizing cry of the reformers, In other words, the appearance of complicity with a violent and secretive organization may be misleading, We should not be surprised if variously located Muslim reformers, newly awaTe that secretive "cells" have become engaged in a shocking escalation of aggrandizing violence, articulate a similar message, and seek to create a broader, middle ground. Authoritarian regimes may, of course, stifle such initiatives, and it is a problem that the United States appears to support such regimes in several Muslim countries, A similar difficulty also occurred in the ostensibly Western democracy of Italy, Until the collapse of the First Italian Republic in 1992, in fact, angry Sicilians wanted to know what sort of a democracy consistently reinstated the same political currents with the help of mafia votes. As Alison Jamieson has written, "The permanence in power of the same coalition of parties, the same party leaders and the same supporting bureaucracies, cemented into place by virtue of their antiCommunist convictions, had encouraged complacency and a sense of superiority to the law" (2000:9). There is another consideration, Our original essay implied that the world's hope for a retreat from the abyss of September 11 rests substantially on the actions of citizens in Muslim countries and communitiesthat we are counting on their groups and movements to reorient the governmental, religious, and educational institutions that have, it is believed, lent support to al-Qaeda, But this formulation overlooks the responsibility of citizens everywhere to address their institutions. In the spirit of the antimafia movement in Sicily, we ask what AmericansMuslim and otherwisemight be able to do to lessen the likelihood that their government's involvements abroad will nourish new monsters. Initiate actions to conserve energy (reducing dependence on foreign oil)? Press for demand reduction, decriminalization, and treatment programs as an alternative to the "war" on drugs? Support projects for economic justice at home and abroad? Monitor and speak out about abuses of civil liberties? Open a debate about militarization in light of the transformed nature of war, in which civilians are increasingly far more vulnerable than combatants?

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Vol. 104, No, 3 September 2002 fighting the Soviet-backed government of Afghanistan, but in a way that would allow the United States to deny such support. Carter's successor, Reagan, reinforced this (deniable) sponsorship in order to lure the Soviet Union into an ever more costly Afghan war, Although the CIA negotiated the arms transfers, it did so with the full consent of Congress; the covert actor in this case was Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or 1SI, which, in the words of a recent analysis of gun running, "demanded and received control over the arms pipeline and the choice of recipients as a precondition for that country's help in channeling weapons to the mujahideen" (Mathiak and Lumpe 2000:61; see also Bergen 2001:66), Between 1979 and 1989, the 1SI took in two billion dollars worth of weapons, amounting to 80 percent of its budget for covert aid and including, after 1986, handheld Stinger missiles. Keeping a large portion of this windfall for itself, it distributed the rest to various clients (Mathiak and Lumpe 2000:61; Bergen 2001:68 gives the figure of three billion dollars), Primary recipients on the Afghan end were the Peshawar-based, pro-Pakistan groups led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Burnhanuddin Rabbani, Adherents of extreme Islamism, both had alliances with Arab immigrants gravitating to the anti-Soviet "jihad," Hekmatyar was also heavily engaged in opium trafficking, Narco-profits and stockpiled weapons would sustain these groups and their Arab Afghan allies in future combat, long after American support had been withdrawn (Bergen 2001:64-65), Journalist Peter Bergen offers a measured, well-documented analysis of what is colloquially referred to as the "blowback" from this CIA sponsorship, By the mid-1980s, he argues, the United States should have foreseen the disastrous implications of funding the Afghan insurgency through the 1SI: Doing so inflated the military capability not only of this covert actor but also of power-crazed religious fanatics with axes to grind in Afghanistan and abroad (Bergen 2001:67), Conveniently, in the early 1990s, alQaeda set up its training camps on the turf of Hekmatyar's group, the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan. In other words, "the troubling legacy of the Afghan war against the communists ended up creating a transnational force of Islamist militants who have spread terrorism and guerilla movements around the world" (Bergen 2001:75), Other sources second this assessment, In the end, say arms-control experts Mathiak and Lumpe, "the secret arms supply operation contributed not only to an ongoing humanitarian crisis and to state and regional instability, but it also strengthened a global network of fundamentalist, virulently anti-Westernand in particular anti-American terrorists" (2000:66), If the unsavory bedfellows deployed by America in its effort to defeat the Soviet Empire spawned a monstrous presence, the gross dislocations of the new "globalizing" imperialism have made things worse, contributing to the growing capacity of terrorist groups to recruit desperate followers. We are reminded of an earlier moment in history

WARSHOT AND COLD

The opening observation of OUT earlier essay was that Sicilians consistently lefer to the lecent ciackdown on organized dime as the lotta contro la mafia (the struggle, against the mafia), eschewing a language of "war." In extrapolating to the ciackdown on al-Qaeda, we recognized that military actions might be necessaiy but aigued that the oveiall undertaking should nevertheless be conceptualized as a campaign or stTUggle, TatheT than a waT, carried on thiough international intelligence gathering, police action, and prosecution in international tribunals, Such a campaign would optimally enjoy the support of citizens' groups as well as states. The argument against the rhetoric of war met with robust agreement across the admittedly skewed sample of people responding to the essay, although one person observed, wryly, that while the word "struggle' is comfortable to Europeans, many Americans associate it with the kinds of labor and revolutionary struggles" that they distrust. Regardless, the possibility for turning the United States's national discourse away from "war" has narrowed because of what is claimed to be the successful, and from many perspectives welcome, military action against the Taliban regime. And yet, such an effort remains urgent, As several respondents pointed out, the political rhetoric of a generic and global "war on terrorism" all too readily legitimates the deployment by various regimes of well-armed police and military units against whatever oppositional voices would threaten or embarrass their power. What is more frightening is that it has recently appeared to pave the way for a U.S. war against Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, defined as the "evil axis, Even if this hot war should not come to pass, the rhetoric of a U.S.-led war on terrorism conjures up a return to the half-century during which the United States, in the guise of the Cold War, achieved imperial dominance, referred to as "the triumph of globalization" or "lone super-power status, As many would argue, the Cold War was won through a combination of diplomacy, economic might, and arming proxy states and substates all over the globe, Bill Keller, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece on October 6, 2001, points out the downside of this: In a cold war "collateral damage means more than the civilians who perish in the path of your air strikes, It means how much you sully yourself by empowering ugly regimes in the name of common struggle, how much you compromise your freedom in the name of security, how much you undermine public trust through lies and patriotic-sounding cant.
EMPOWERING UNSAVORY BEDFELLOWS

There is yet another problem. Armed by empires in their climb to supremacy, unsavory bedfellows gain power and become dangerous on their own terms. Nothing makes this point better than the prehistory of al-Qaeda. As is now widely acknowledged, beginning in the Carter administration, it was U.S. policy to arm guerilla movements

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when competition for imperial dominance also nurtured a "stateless" criminal network that was threatening to many countriesnamely the 17th-century run-up to British imperial supremacy, Along with the Dutch and the French, this North Atlantic power expanded its global reach through, among other things, the sponsorship of pirates. So long as they raided Portuguese and Spanish vessels, pirate bands, recruited from the colonies as well as from Europe, were encouragedindeed, in the case of privateers, they were licensedby the English state to engage in criminal activity, With time, pirate networks proliferated, and with them a far-flung set of supportive relations in the port cities of the colonies, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean, and North America sustained ports where, in exchange for booty, pirates could find recreation and provisions, By the early 18th century, both merchant shipping and piracy were transformed by the further expansion of empire, as deep-water traffic in basic goods and slaves grew in proportion to coastal traffic in luxury goods, Merchant ships came to resemble floating wooden prisons in which authoritarian captains, gratuitously exploitative, even murderously cruel, disciplined sailors recruited from the poorest, most marginal classes on land (see Rediker 1989), Increasingly, pirates expressed the grievances of these sailors: In hijacking ships, they executed summary justice against the tyrannical ship's officers, welcomed the vengefully mutinous crew members into their fold, and rioted against the authorities who sought to intervene, Selfhelp justice and equity were their watchwords; skeletons adorned their flags, A demobilization of sailors under arms following the conclusion of England's military confrontations with Spain meant additional manpower for piracy. In 1720, a decision was made to launch a forceful "crackdown" on this increasingly unruly and threatening force, Officers and colonial officials arrested and executed perhaps five hundred pirates in ports around the world, displaying their bodies as object lessons in gruesome public hangings (Rediker 1989:283). Significantly, in each of the port cities where trials and hangings occurred, citizens participated approvingly, as did religious authorities and publicists who shaped opinion on "cleansing" the seas of piracy, notwithstanding these cities' easy transactions with pirates in an earlier time (Rediker 1989:285), In the words of Marcus Rediker, whose account we have been following, the pirates ultimately had "a fragile social world, They produced nothing and had no secure place in the economic order. They had no nation, no home; they were widely dispersed; their community had virtually no geographic boundaries, These deficiencies of social organization made them, in the long run, relatively easy prey" (1989:285; see also Richie 1986). Pirates did not wholly disappear, Today indeed they are back with a vengeance, operating out of ports in outlying islands of Southeast Asia and preying on container ships (Steinberg 2001), In the short run, moreover, they were locked in a reciprocal reign of terror with the English

state and its allies. All told, the pirates of the early 18th century seem noteworthy for having erupted from an endemic condition into a virulent and threatening challenge to the international "order"' even while they had been nurtured by a rising empire (that then felt compelled to suppress them). The al-Qaeda network has been defined by the fanatical religious commitment of its adherents, their hostility to secular states, and this tempts some to assimilate it to Islamism, if not Islam, Our argument is that it is more fruitfully understood as a violent and secretive organization that, like the mafia, benefited from some reckless and ill-considered acts of sponsorship, proffered by parts of many institutions and states, Its vengeful energy has been amplified by the dislocations of globalization, If it can be investigated and its members prosecuted, tried, and punished, the world will be a safer place, Neutralizing the forces that amplify such a phenomenon is another story, completely intertwined with those bigger struggles for a world that is more equitable and just. In neither case does the expression "global war on terrorism" capture what is at stake, More seriously, such war talk risks deeply alienating the citizens of the planet on whom successful intelligence gathering, prosecution, and moves toward justice and equity depend.
JANE SCHNEIDER Department of Anthropology, Graduate

Center, City University of New York, New York, NY 10016

PETER SCHNEIDER Department of Sociology, Fordham Univer-

sity, New York, NY 10023

REFERENCES CITED

Bergen, Peter L. 2001 Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. New York: The Free Press. Chubb, Judith 1982 Patronage, Power, and Poverty in Southern Italy: A Tale of Two Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, della Porta, Donatella, and Alberto Vannucci 1994 Corruzione politica e amministrazione publicca. Bologna: 1 1 Mulino, Fentress, James 2000 Rebels and Mafiosi: Death in a Sicilian Landscape. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ginsborg, Paul 1990 A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988. London: Penguin Books. Jamieson, Alison 2000 The Antimafia: Italy's Fight against Organized Crime. London: Macmillan Press. Keller, Bill 2001 The 40-Year War. New York Times, Op-Ed, October 6. Lodato, Saverio 1999 Ho ucciso Giovanni Falcone: La confessione di Giovanni Brusca, Milano: Mondadori. Lupo, Salvatore 1990 Tra banca e politica: 1 delitto Notarbartolo. Meridiana; 1 Rivista di Storiae Scienze Sociali 7-8:119-156. 1993 Storia della mafia: Dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Rome: Donzelli Editore. 1997 The Allies and the Mafia. Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2:21-33,

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Rossetti, Carlo 1994 L'attaco allo stato di diritto, le associazioni segrete e la costituzione. Napoli: Liguori Editore, Santino, Umberto 1997 La democraziabloccata, La Strage di Portella della Ginestra e l'emarginazione delle sinistre, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2000 Storia del movimento antimafia: Dalla lotta di classe all'impegno civile. Rome: Editori Riuniti. Santino, Umberto, and Giovanni La Fiura 1990 L'impresa mafiosa; Dall'ltalia agli Stati Uniti, Palermo: Franco Angeli, Centro Siciliano di Documentazione Giuseppe Impastato, Schneider, Jane 1998 Introduction: The Dynamics of Neo-Orientalism in Italy (1848-1995), In Italy's "Southern Question": Orientalism in One Country. Jane Schneider, ed. Pp. 1-27, Oxford; Berg. Schneider, Jane, and Peter Schneider 2001 Civil Society versus Organized Crime: Local and Global Perspectives. Critique of Anthropology 21:427-446. In press Reversible Destiny; Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo, Berkeley: University of California Press. Schneider, Peter, and Jane Schneider 1998 II Caso Sciascia: Dilemmas of the Antimafia Movement in Sicily. In Italy's "Southern Question": Orientalism in One Country. Jane Schneider, ed. Pp. 245-260. Oxford: Berg. Steinberg, Phil 2001 How Does the World Rein in Stateless Terrorists, Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, December 3. Stille, Alexander 1995 Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic. New York; Vintage Books.

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