ABSTRACT
The capitalist unification of the planet which has been at work since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the end of the Soviet Union and the adoption of the market economy in China, allowed for the reopening of the former silk roads, which were also those used for drugs.1 According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), world opium production has increased two-fold since the break-up of the USSR.2 Eurasia is no longer split by an iron curtain or by Sino-Soviet border tension, while the former Soviet Union is weakly recomposed as a Russian state - the Confederation of Independent States (CIS) - and in an Islamic Fundamentalism reinforcement context. The multiplication of conflicts among Sunni, Shiite and Orthodox populations, from the Balkans to Central Asia, has reinforced the tendency towards militarization. The disintegration or the collapse of communist parties, which were based on an accumulation and management of political capital, has given birth to a new logic of power, founded on the nationalist re-conversion of the bureaucratic elite and on their accelerated re-appropriation of public capital. This dynamic simultaneously favours military influence, which appears as the shield or the spearhead for fragile authorities, and local or sectorial bureaucracies. The latter reinforce tendencies
toward economic feudalism. In their new managerial roles, local authorities or central authorities, owners of a monopoly, aim to maximize enterprise or activity incomes that are under their control by minimizing the risks of external competition. Far from breaking monopolies, the institutional structures of decentralization have multiplied them. The institutional structures favour the creation of a profit economy without competition which, allied to the coercive means of the army, constitutes an ideal environment for the development of a Mafia, in the actual context of the globalization of trade.
