Anti-mafia organizing and solidarity movements in Italy

For more than 150 years, Italy has been home to a resilient and evolving resistance against the pervasive influence of mafias. While these criminal organizations are renowned for their vast international business enterprises, the collective actions taken to oppose them are less known. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among anti-mafia alliances in Campania, Sicily, and other parts of Italy, Christina Jerne explores anti-mafia activism, revealing how ordinary people resist, counter, and prevent criminal economies from proliferating. Jerne is joined in conversation with Deborah Puccio-Den and Trine Mygind Korsby.

Christina Jerne is associate professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Experience Economy at Aarhus University, Denmark. Jerne is author of Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism and coeditor and translator of Against the Mafia: The Classic Italian Writings.

Deborah Puccio-Den is a political anthropologist and research professor at the National Center for Scientific Research and the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. She is author of Mafiacraft: An Ethnography of Deadly Silence.

Trine Mygind Korsby is assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen and currently Marie Curie fellow at graduate center City of New York.

REFERENCES:

Mafiacraft: An Ethnography of Deadly Silence / Deborah Puccio-Den

Umberto Santino

Giovanni Falcone

Audre Lorde

J. K. Gibson-Graham

Bruno Latour

Jean Luc Nancy

Gabriel Tarde

Gilles Deleuze

Felix Guattari

Addiopizzo

Praise for the book:
"Placing human experience at the center of collective action, Opposition by Imitation presents radically new directions for thinking about social movements. Christina Jerne captures both the fragility and strength of the struggle against mafia economies, powerfully demonstrating how anti-mafia activism opens up space for non-mafia relationships and economies to flourish."
—Kevin McDonald, Middlesex University

Opposition by Imitation: The Economics of Italian Anti-Mafia Activism by Christina Jerne is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.