The paper analyses the strategies of homeless street children in Moscow connected with the accumulation of social capital. Based on recent empirical research, it looks at the involvement of children in non-criminal and criminal subcultures as a way to get access to important networks and resources, and shows how young people use their social skills and appropriate subcultural norms and values in order to build alternative careers. It demonstrates that children's social background plays an important role in their trajectories in the urban informal economy and society, and that they should not be viewed, as it is usually suggested in the social exclusion paradigm, as a single dispossessed mass which has fallen through support networks in various risk scenarios. Research data is reviewed to provide evidence that Moscow's homeless children are resourceful and deeply social agents who fmd surrogate families and ad hoc social memberships.
The article analyses the evolution of the state-organized crime relationship in Russia during the post-Soviet transition. Using a case study conducted in Tatarstan, which included interviews with criminal gang members and representatives of law enforcement agencies and analysis of secondary data, it argues that instead of a pattern of elimination or subjugation of Russian organized crime by the state, we see a mutually reinforcing ensemble which reproduces the existing social order. While both the strengthening of the state and organized crime actors' own ambitions led to their increasing integration into political structures, a complex web of interdependencies emerged in which actors from criminal networks and political authorities collaborated using each other's resources. This fusion and assimilation of members of the governing bureaucracy and members of an aspiring bourgeoisie coming from criminal backgrounds were as much the result of consensus and cooperation as of competition and confrontation.
No abstract
This article discusses the evolution of street gangs in the Russian city of Kazan. Using historic and interview data, it shows that the changes in the social organization of these gangs were a reaction to a series of systemic crises in the Soviet and post-Soviet social order. As a result of power deficits, emerging in the space of the streets and in the larger society, the gangs moved through several stages: a) youth peer groups acting out traditional prescriptions of masculine socialisation; (b) territorial 'elite' formations; (c) 'violent entrepreneurs' and (d) autonomous ruling regimes. The article demonstrates that the gangs, while utilising violence to achieve their projects of social and economic domination, may also regulate its use. It argues that the gangs can be seen as historic agents participating in ground-level social regulation, and not simply products and producers of social disorder.The period of the collapse of Soviet state socialism and the birth of a new capitalist society at the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s is often characterised in Russia as a time of bespredel [limitlessness or lawlessness] -an absence of any moral or legal regulation of social life. In the abnormality of this absence, people were at a loss as to how to navigate a world whose normative map was now torn apart, and in which previously unseen predators seemed to have surfaced and moved onto the central stage. Shady entrepreneurs, mafia groups and street gangs of young people represented a new frightening reality and reflected a slide into the rule of unbridled greed, violence and brute force.However, this picture of social disorganization -of a profound social 'crisis' (Shevchenko, 2009) -masks the reality of new social orders being established in the cracks of the Russian state. The 'predators' were not simply the personification of 'social evil', nor were they just parasites exploiting the situation of economic and normative collapse. They responded to the emerging power deficits by creating their own systems of violent rule.Researchers have shown how various pre-existing Soviet networks and organizations, for example those established in the Komsomol (communist youth orgnisation) and party circles, by black marketeers, professional criminals, groups of migrants etc., became important players in taking control of resources during the period of rapid disintegration of the Soviet system The Sociological Review, 59:2 (2011)
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