Overview

As in most countries of the former Warsaw Pact or of Eastern Europe with a socialist-communist regime, in former Yugoslavia too, the birth of organised crime groups was a direct product of state security services of authoritative regimes in decadence. The roots of most of these groups are to be found in the association of the state securities or secret polices with the crime-milieu. The formal practice of employing professional criminals for state-operations organised and supported by these obscure state services was established and conducted from the early beginnings of socialists/communist regimes onward. For the regime, the use of an otherwise problematic social layer at the margins of socialist societies was founded on the principle of like cures like'. Using this method, the state security service in former Yugoslavia employed professional criminals in the elimination of political dissidents, enemies of socialism' and used their services to produce illicit profit for its financing. When the Milosevic regime rose to power, the Service' just changed its master' but the method remained the same. Professional criminals were recruited to join or to lead a so called unit of volunteers'. Often these criminals exchanged their time in prison for a time at the battlefield'. The Serbian warlords were able to carry out the political goals of the Belgrade-regime and were granted in exchange open hands' in looting and developing illicit trade. As feudal vassals they exchanged their services for the privileges they obtained from the state. From the margins of society, empowered by crime, sustained by the media, fully benefiting on violence, they rose to the highest peaks of Serbian society. This book's goal is to depict the rise of the Serbian warrior-aristocracy.

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9781634833233

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Maria Vivod is an Associate researcher and Ethnologist at the research laboratory Dynamics of Europe based in Strasbourg, France. She received her PhD in Ethnology in 2005 from the University Marc Bloch in Strasbourg, France in Sociology and Demography reference: Ethnology. Her research interests include identity, ethnic, and social conflicts; ethnic belonging; world tradition and change; politics of the Balkans; medical anthropology; social mobility and migration; and visual anthropology. She also has a masters Degree (1996) in French Literature at University of Novi Sad, Serbia. M. Vivod is fluent in German, English, French, Hungarian and Serbian. She is also the author and director of several ethnographic documentaries. She lives in Serbia and she is a civil rights activist fighting against forms of censorship.

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