Economic Crime and Neoliberal Modes of Government: The Example of the Mediterranean

This article shows that the condemnation of organized crime stems from a simplistic explanation that obscures mechanisms and practices (such as subcontracting and badly managed invitations to tender) that are much more problematic, albeit difficult to condemn. The article demonstrates that current modalities of denunciation of economic crime are representative of the neoliberal modes of government. Through the analysis of the fight against illegal migration, money-laundering, fakes, smuggling and trafficking of goods, this essay shows that resorting to the criminalization and reification of the figures of "evil" (the terrorist, the smuggler, the mafia member, organized crime) becomes an opportunity to organize the field of possible state interventions, the condition of new state actions, an opportunity, thus, to strengthen political domination through intermediaries and private actors. The fight against crime appears more like the province of the imaginaire, where fear reigns, and the search for scapegoats deemed to catalyze this fear. It is also the province of a commitment to State action in a context that actually limits such commitment.