Banditry

Banditry is notoriously difficult to define. As a type of predatory, acquisitive, and violent action by groups of men (and sometimes women), it has a long history dating from ancient Greece, Rome, and China. In central and eastern Europe and in the Balkans, it was found in the countryside, in specific conditions (after wars, following massive dislocation, etc.), and in specific periods, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the nation-state was emerging. In Latin America, it was part and parcel of an expanding frontier economy.

Banditry usually emerges in remote, hard-to-control mountainous areas that contain large numbers of semimobile and state-resistant pastoralists. Although there are examples of lone bandits, many bandits tends to form fluid bands, sometimes of up to twenty persons. Kinship, real or fictive, is an important component of their organization. Solidarity is reinforced through the institutions of blood-brotherhood and adoption, as well as feasting and other rituals.

Banditry includes a variety of groups, ranging from the camel-raiding Bedouin, to the “noble bandits” of nineteenth-century Greek klephts, to contemporary armed autonomist groups (such as Chiapas in Mexico and Kurds in Turkey), all labeled “bandits” by the state in its equally repressive policies against the countryside.

As banditry involves targeted, personalized violence and theft—two of the most ambiguous forms of social relations of exchange—it has been subject to different interpretations. More than most other social phenomena, the characterization of banditry depends upon how it is approached. Banditry can be seen as a legal category, a social category, a social representation, or a series of powerful stories and myths. Its meaning has changed across time and across disciplines. As a state-legal category, banditry is a pernicious form of illegality [Page 98]that subverts the state's monopoly of legitimate Violence. From the perspective of the modern nation-state, bandits (or brigands, a term more popular in the nineteenth century) are criminals who resist the civilizing power of the state through violence, brutality, extortion, theft, and protection rackets. Bandits are seen as beyond the pale of “civilized society,” a symptom of the low level of development of the countryside, a problem impeding progress. Thus, they merit swift, brutal suppression by the army or police, without much regard to the constitutional human rights the modern state claims to protect (e.g., summary execution of “collaborators”).

Historical sources such as army or police officers charged with ridding the countryside of such “sores” or “plagues” are highly partial. From the perspective of the “bandit,” the situation may be different; escaping to the mountains may be the only way to avoid an unjust state summons or to pursue a private revenge. Banditry is crucially linked to feuding and the vendetta, and, indeed, it can be seen at the grassroots as an expression and realization of forms of murderous hostility.

Traditional historians, who often depicted the history of the nation-state as the progress of civilization over barbarism, neglected such sources as ballads, popular accounts, and oral history, which concentrated on bandits' roles as popular heroes.

Two pioneer historians who emphasized the social aspects of banditry were Franco Molfese (1975) and Eric Hobsbawm (1969). In his celebrated book, Hobsbawm interprets bandits as pre-political rebels. Social bandits are considered by their people to be heroes, champions, and fighters for justice in a world that often denied them justice. Hobsbawm distinguished bandits from gangs drawn from the professional underworld, and from communities such as the Bedouin, in which raiding was a normal way of life. According to Hobsbawm, bandits are symptoms of major transformations in society, but they do not transform society. They are activists, not ideologues, and they disappear from the modern world after 1945. Bandits are recruited from the most mobile segments of peasant society: young unmarried men, landless laborers, migrants, shepherds, ex-soldiers, and deserters. They take to the hills to right some personal wrong, becoming “noble robbers.” Although they are supported by the local community whose yearnings for a pre-political just world they embody, they are usually betrayed.

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