55 – Woven Braids: Crime, Capitalism, and the State in South Asia

October 3, 2025
8:30 am
H03
At a time of rising corruption, crime, and criminalization in South Asia, it is especially important to consider what role crime plays for economic growth and state apparatuses. This panel explores the ways in which the realms of crime, politics, and business get deeply entwined in South Asia, and what inequalities emerge from these intertwinements. Scholars of crime have moved away from narrow definitions of criminal organizations as autonomous, internally cohesive, and bounded systems (Levien 2021; Martin and Michelutti 2017; Michelutti et al. 2019), to take seriously how crime works in coalition with rapid economic growth and strengthening state institutions. However, the question of how and through what kinds of relations crime, state, and capital are being intertwined in worldly encounters is still open and deserves further attention. Without an adequate analysis of how informal, criminal networks actually permeate the formal realms of state and capital, we overlook the inner workings and exacerbating inequalities that continue to make these entwined coalitions possible in South Asia. This panel addresses these issues by considering the social embeddedness of crime and corruption. We build on anthropological studies of Italian mafia that have pointed to the relevance of the concept of intreccio (interweaving), literally a “plaited hairdo of tightly woven braids” (Schneider 2018: 16), to grasp the entanglements between crime and the social contexts in which it operates. Our key aim is to probe and adapt this conceptual framework to reflect the role criminal political economies play in South Asia today, with an eye to the emerging inequalities in India and in nearby South Asian contexts. The panel aims to offer a comparative perspective of intreccio in different South Asian contexts, and ultimately ask: what are the implications of intreccio for the forms the political can take?

Convenors

Chiara Arnavas
Arild Engelsen Ruud

Presentations

Cash, Cashlessness and Criminality: Hawala in the Indian political imagination
Saraf Aditi - Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
Coal criminality: ‘Pilfering’, extortion and corruption for national energy security
Oskarsson Patrik - Dept of Urban and Rural Development, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Kindo Nikas - Human Sciences Research Center, International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India
Honey traps: lawfare as business
Michelutti Lucia - UCL, UCL, London, United Kingdom
Failed Expectations: Agrarian Capitalism, Political Rent-Seeking, and the Crisis of Governance in Punjab
Martin Nicolas - Indian Studies, Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Murder, money, fear and charity : the making of “Mafya Dons” in the coal capital of India
Lukacs Thibault - Centre d'Etudes Sud-Asiatique et Himalayen (CESAH-CNRS), Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, France
The return of ‘Top Terror’ in post-revolutionary Bangladesh
Jackman David - University of Oxford, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
Weaponising Credibility: Lawfare, Bureaucratic Violence, and Bangladeshi Asylum Seekers in the UK
Hoque Ashraf - UCL, UCL, London, United Kingdom
How Does Intreccio work? Muslim Criminalization and Land Mafia In West Bengal, India
Arnavas Chiara - South Asian Studies, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway