Organized crime and terrorism as para-political forms

Abstract

This paper represents a sociological and politological research dealing with the analysis of a social phenomenon of so-called "modern barbarism" as a specific phenomenon opposing the official institutionalized civic politics. Crime and terrorism are recognized to be the most important forms of this "modern barbarism", identified in this paper as specific para-political forms with their own particular ethics, worldviews, institutions and internal organization. This paper concludes that terrorism and organized crime cannot be regarded as mere social deviations, but they should rather be seen as a complete and integral social phenomenon with a stable and specific structure when we take into account that they represent explicit para-political forms which practice a specific anti-civic understanding of politics, thus representing the dominant anti-civic forms of power of our time.