War Making and State Making as Organized Crime

Charles Tilly’s article “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” in the book “Bringing the State Back In” edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) argues that war making and state making are activities closely related to organized crime. Tilly claims that war making and state making qualify as our largest examples of organized crime. He argues that war making and state making are quintessential protection rackets with the advantage of legitimacy.

Tilly’s reflections illustrate the analogy of war making and state making with organized crime from a few hundred years of European experience and offer tentative arguments concerning principles of change and variation underlying the experience. Tilly’s reflections grow from contemporary concerns: worries about the increasing destructiveness of war, the expanding role of great powers as suppliers of arms and military organization to poor countries, and the growing importance of military rule in those same countries.

Tilly’s article is an important contribution to our understanding of how states are formed and maintained. It highlights the role of violence in state formation and challenges conventional views that states are formed through social contracts or open markets. Tilly’s work has been influential in shaping debates about state formation and has helped to shift attention away from purely economic explanations towards more complex political explanations.

As Tilly himself notes, “Without branding all generals and statesmen as murderers or thieves, I want to urge the value of that analogy.”