ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some closing thoughts relevant to the key concepts covered in this book. The book has endeavoured to outline the patterns of continuity and change in the politics of protection rackets from the New Order into the post-New Order present. It found the coexistence of seemingly contradictory ventures within a single gang or organisation: semi-organised criminal and predatory behaviour as a means of primitive accumulation; forms of political organisation, consciousness and agency on the part of members; and utilitarian alliances with local or national political elites. The most significant challenge posed to militias, populist racketeers and their patrons is the counter-hegemonic social forces that they seek to suppress or co-opt, such as class-based forms of grass-roots organisation and mobilisation of the poor. This kind of politics can move beyond populist rhetoric and go some way to tackling the structural conditions reproducing poverty and social and political exclusion.
