In the event of war, a manual published in 1965 distinguishes four phases in the evolution of criminal behavior. Four ‘stages’.
The author, a criminologist, is well aware of the Second World War, which ended 20 years earlier, and the First World War, which he experienced directly as a soldier. [1]
The four stages he identifies are:
First. A widespread sentiment of cohesion appears in the face of danger, a sort of ideological cementation. A duty of unity that takes the form of renewed patriotism, a feeling of being united by the same concerns.
It is the beginning. Phase one, the moment in which there is awareness of the danger.
Crimes decrease significantly, just as astonishment grows towards those who commit them in a moment of threat to the entire country. [2]
It is a known mechanism which, if used outside of real threats, like ‘crying wolf’, pointing out an enemy, has always been an opportunity to promote social cohesion towards a group, an idea… a government. [3]
Second. After a short while, weeks not months, the statistics of crimes resume growing.
Economic offenses grow significantly: fraud, black market, and theft.
Fraud competes with the black market, with informal markets. From an existential point of view, the black economy becomes a place for selecting life opportunities. It is not a place for everyone; only those who can afford it purchase the life-saving drug, the necessary food, the water. Only those who have value to exchange—currency, valuables, important goods—if they do not profit from it, manage to survive.
At the same time, the ‘Primitivism’ of criminal conduct against the person grows: homicide and sexual violence entries increase.
The growth of crimes related to security and economy soon translates into a hypertrophic production of penal law. A multiplication of rules and prohibitions that chase the growth of criminal statistics. Yet, and at the same time, the boundary between legal and illegal becomes elastic in society.
In everyday life, the judgment on what is right or wrong becomes less certain. The conflict between formal law and basic daily necessities, no longer guaranteed by institutions, has immediate consequences on common morality. A divergent view towards conduct that was once highly stigmatized grows. [4]
Third. Adaptation, is the debut on the criminal scene of people committing their first crime, a phenomenon that particularly concerns women and minors.
‘Primary’ properly speaking, because they are people with a past of ordinary social integration and no deviance. Adaptation because these behaviors are made necessary by the context.
A direct consequence of the reduction of lawful survival options is the adoption of illegal, criminal practices. Practices of adaptation to the context of scarcity and few opportunities: job loss, unions of convenience, reduction of irreplaceable goods, responsibilities to be fulfilled in conditions of increasing difficulty. For these reasons, too, juvenile delinquency increases, to which is added the failure of schools and ordinary educational structures. If it is then war, blackout and safety shelters to protect oneself become an occasion for “theft and bad sexual conduct”. But the most lasting effect is on children aged 4-5. And, in this scenario of generalized disorganization, with the displacement of growing masses from urban centers or those exposed to danger, culturally founded conflicts between city and countryside grow. [5]
Fourth. Finally, once the conflict has ceased, it is the permanence of the criminogenic effects and the related social costs that influence social reorganization for a long time, just as the permanence of psychological effects from trauma and the resulting disabilities will be lasting.
This temporal evolution therefore indicates a direct relationship between the growth of disorganization and the affirmation of crime.
In this study, the growth of crime is not a consequence of a collective moral collapse, of the choice of multitudes to do evil, nor of an uncontrolled growth of crimes that in turn cause a system crisis. [7]
This work seems to say that a conflict capable of threatening institutional and social life demonstrates the influence of environmental factors in the production of criminality and its forms.
Environmental factors are factors external to the individual, to their capabilities or constraints. They are the health status of the community as a whole. From a political point of view, they are the good functionality of the institutions that deal with education, labor, health, security, as well as the perception of well-being that citizens have, of being able to project themselves into the future. [9]
In daily debate, motivated by ‘true crime’ stories, striking facts that capture attention lead one to think of an inability to restore order, to guarantee security. [10]
Looking at the recent history of Italy, what would happen if a criminal organization cartel asserted itself in the political and economic sphere? [11] If we again had a season of massacres co-managed by sectors of the State and organized crime, by malevolent influences of foreign governments, and very serious coup attempts? [12]
Read forward, placed in a row in their becoming, the four stages therefore tell us when, how much, and which crimes an extreme conflict—here, war—certainly produces in a nation.
Read backwards, rewinding the tape, they tell us what would be better to have before a vital conflict hits us: avoid the weakening of the existential functions for which institutions exist: protection of health, labor, education, security, the environment, fundamental freedoms, understanding changing social needs, and avoiding authoritarian temptations. [13]
Moreover, it seems intuitive, and valid for today:
The ideological cementation (stage 1) becomes all the more uncritical the more pluralism of information is fragile, the organizations for protecting interests are silenced or are compliant, functional to the existing power structures. And the effect of this feeling will be all the more inconsistent the more, we can imagine, divergences and alternatives are silenced;
The predatory phase (2) has an easy time if public controls, especially in environmental, fiscal, and economic matters, start off already weakened by scarcity of resources, by sectoral choices of co-opting consensus at the expense of others, by ideological hostility in the eternal debate of whether there should be more State or more market, or due to the lack of a consolidated culture of the common good. [14]
Adaptation (3) declares that civil cohesion is compromised in strategic sectors of living. Common feeling veers towards uncertainty when the widespread perception is that public and private institutions do not operate in the general interest, an interest protected by oversight and control bodies, the judiciary, especially the accounting one, the specialized branches of the police, and, no less importantly, social solidarity groups, the third sector in general;
Permanence (4) lingers where there are no sufficient antibodies, the selection of daily life possibilities is not equal for everyone, and the care and reception of the victim is not systematic, but in some way selective.
Very recent opinions, not from 1965, follow this very thread of thought: in a stably democratic framework, effective control bodies and adequate norms are areas for protecting system stability in addition to general equity, along with a widespread consensus on the protection of common goods. [15]
We can put it this way: roughly speaking, the type, duration, and severity of the crimes that await us in a condition of generalized crisis is predictable. And this prediction is dependent on the strength or weakness of the institutions we have in pre-crisis times.
Crisis or not, crimes are the same, but it is their meaning that changes. Social systems with democratic institutions are less exposed to changes in the perception of what is criminal, to interested propaganda, to reducing themselves to accepting behaviors previously denied. [16]
In short, an important current of thought, between criminology and political science, which goes from the mid-twentieth century to today, reminds us that nations, our social systems, our States, depend on the state of health of our liberal democracies. [17]
Pragmatic, less ideological in their assumptions, there are, however, other perspectives that ask to be considered.
Traditional or otherwise, hybrid or by proxy, wars are made by States.
They are, essentially, the criminal operators and the criminogenic cause. As has been noted, from this point of view, war is first and foremost a State crime. [18]
Those who see the concrete behaviors performed by soldiers or militias representing some political entity cannot doubt the variety of criminal behaviors thus perpetrated because they are requested, incentivized, and applied as part of the war strategy for which legitimate political and military decision-makers are responsible.
We will talk about it in better detail in subsequent posts. But it is immediate to find congruences in the news: the Russian Federation against Ukraine, Israel against Palestine (here understood as a political entity recognized by the UN [19]), Hamas against the State of Israel.
And it does not change the point that the executioners—those who concretely carry out the orders—are zealous executors, very happy to operate even beyond the orders received in terms of ferocity and cruelty. From the career volunteers who composed the Nazi SS battalions, to the murderers for amusement of the Siege of Sarajevo, to the happy pilots operating drones remotely in the war against Ukraine. Attitudes about which Hannah Arendt wrote definitive words, and well beyond the so-called ‘Lucifer Effect’. [20]
Finally, admitting both points of view, which are otherwise distant—the old criminologist and the modern reflections of Cartabia and Violante on one side, and more recent criminology on the other—on one point the two perspectives seem to coexist: the forms of crime that materialize in proximity to or during wars are predictable. They are historical evidence, facts that generate and constitute the victims to whom these posts look.
Both points of view direct us to the same conclusion: the forms of crime that the four stages trace are not exceptions, they are not deviance. They are the norm, in every sense, formal and material.
-> This translation has been made by an AI (Gemini). Unfortunately, the links were not included, I apologize.
This is the fourth post in a series titled ‘Sotto la Guerra’ (Under the War). To date, the following subtitles have been published: 00- Introduction; 02 Community and crime; 06 Dehumanization;
I remind you that each post is organized into two levels: the text imagines a typical 17-year-old reader, in their third year of high school; the text plus the notes is for a university reader or one with professional skills. The audio part is for those who have reading difficulties; here, the notes are not read. For other methodological aspects, see the Introduction <-
NOTES
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Mannheim.
Mannheim, Hermann. 1975. Trattato di criminologia comparata. Vol. 2. Torino: Einaudi.
For reasons of readability, the text develops on Mannheim’s theses, except for the conclusions where the meaning of the author’s hypotheses is updated to today. In the notes, however, the reasoning is more articulated, current events are introduced, and theses and authors reflecting on today on similar themes are recalled. In the notes, the discourse is more technical and updated. - Mannheim, Hermann. 1975. Trattato… op. cit. p. 661.
As a didactic duty, let’s say, it must be remembered that other authors provide alternative explanations. The decline recorded would be due to changes in the population structure and improvements in economic conditions, not to emotional factors. - This mechanism, aimed at the negative, is also treated in the post Sotto la Guerra. 06, Deumanizzare. Also see note 14 in Sotto la guerra. 02, Comunità e crimine.
- Mannheim, Hermann. 1975. Trattato… op. cit. p. 662.
- Ivi. pp. 663-664.
Regarding the issue of minors, the mental mechanisms of adolescence, the relevance of knowledgeable educational structures, see: Grimoldi, Mauro. 2024. Dieci lezioni sul male. I crimini degli adolescenti. Milano: Raffaello Cortina, the first chapter and p. 34 and ff. - Ivi p. 665; for juvenile delinquency, the growth factor was estimated at 140% for the period 1939-1943. Instead, regarding the documented long-term psychological effects: Mannheim, Hermann. 1941. War and Crime. London: Watts & Co. pp. 72-74.
- Moreover, when one begins to speak of moral collapse, it is always better to be vigilant. Those who argue it, even if they do not say it openly, simultaneously argue that their own morality is the right one. A premise of every dictatorship, because every dictatorship relies on moral primogeniture, moral condemnations, divine investitures, etc.
Temelkuran, Ece. 2019. Come sfasciare un paese in sette mosse. La via che porta dal populismo alla dittatura. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.
Fraser, Nancy. 2023. Capitalismo Cannibale; Come Il Sistema Sta Divorando La Democrazia, Il Nostro Senso Di Comunita E Il Pianeta. Bari-Roma: Laterza. pp. 104 and ff. - In general, it refers to a set of factors—economic, cultural, social in a broad sense, from urban planning to material relations between groups, etc. Sometimes the preeminence of one of these factors over others has been proposed.
- In various eras, and for decades, it was believed (propagated, better said) to have discovered ‘The cause’, the etiology, of criminal behavior. The apical motive, capable of explaining the presence and spread of evil, of abject behavior.
Events show the opposite. For some time, we have been convinced that searching for ‘a’ cause does not make much sense. And in the meantime, it has been noted how it is not so peaceful to define what is deviant or criminal, as there is no behavior that can be judged criminal in absolute terms, not even homicide… But, even wanting to overlook this detail, we have been convinced that there is not a single cause, but rather a multiplicity of co-causes, simultaneously operating, and moreover variable according to latitude and historical moment.
Fassin, Didier. 2018. Punire. Una passione contemporanea. Milano: Feltrinelli. - Cartabia and Violante observe that the information produced by the digital environment is additive and not narrative: they accumulate but do not compose themselves into a story, because they lack a historical link that holds them together. Collective memory, they write, risks being reduced to a saturated archive without a plot, “a hard drive stuffed with information of every kind,” a numerical order that fragments experience instead of giving it shape. To this is added that online communication, only apparently spontaneous, is exposed to algorithmic manipulation: fake news, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and foreign interference, especially in election campaigns, degrade public debate. The authors signal the risk of an individual increasingly isolated online and heterodirected by pervasive technologies capable of orienting behavior in an opaque way, confusing the real and the artificial—a risk not only commercial but political, as shown by the Cambridge Analytica case.
Cartabia, Marta, e Luciano Violante. 2026. La democrazia non esiste in natura. Lezioni di storia politica in difesa dei valori comuni. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, pp. 14-17.
Temelkuran, Ece. 2019. Come sfasciare un paese in sette mosse. op cit. cap. 4 in particular. - Read in this sense the extensive production of reflections, testimonies, and texts on mafias, from Libera to Gratteri. For ex.
Nicaso, Antonio, e Nicola Gratteri. 2022. Fuori dai confini. Milano: Mondadori. By the same authors: (2009). Fratelli di sangue. Milano: Mondadori. Gratteri, Nicola, Antonio Nicaso e Paolo Di Giannantonio. 2025. “Lezioni di mafie”. Roma: La7. Recorded at the Teatro Palladium of Roma Tre University.
Regarding Libera. Associations, names, and numbers against mafias see the site and, in particular, here. - Deaglio, Enrico. 2011. Patria 1978-2010. Il Saggiatore. By the same author: Indagine sul ventennio. Milano: Feltrinelli; C’era una volta in Italia. Gli anni ottanta. p. 62-63 in part.. and, for everyone, passim.
Beccaria, Antonella. 2024. Golpe di Stato. Neofascisti, servizi segreti, P2: tutti gli attacchi a una Repubblica incompiuta. Roma: PaperFIRST by il Fatto Quotidiano.
Facchini, Alice. 2026. “Come si fa memoria di un evento come il G8” in Post of 19/7/26 and bibliography therein; see also the interview with Placanica, Mario on the same newspaper, at this link.
Limiti, Stefania. 2022. Potere occulto. Roma: Chiarelettere. - One of the recurring motives of complaint towards the State is the observation that the proliferation of laws and control bodies hinders the progress of the economy and, ultimately, general well-being. It is the idea that intersects the conviction that the market is the best regulator of itself and that the growth of the economic system automatically translates into greater general well-being. Wealth would be redistributed by automatism. An “invisible hand” that operates beyond the egoism of the individual. Ancient, seventeenth-eighteenth-century ideas, to say that they cyclically reappear, counting on historical ignorance, essentially.
On the defendant’s bench are the existence or the proliferation of laws. The regulation that hinders the free affirmation of the economy. It is indeed true—always in general—that a norm is produced because a place of associated life needs a rule, that is, a mediation between divergent interests regulated within procedures that make the conflict predictable in its evolution. A safe work environment, agreed wages, certain pensions, free competition in the economy, health protection and qualified operators, accessible schools and titled teachers, correct management of public money. Examples all realized by laws and protected by control bodies. - Berlin, Isaiah. 2003. Il potere delle idee. Trad. G. Ferrara degli Uberti. Milano: Adelphi. p. 175 and ff.
- Also for this reason, the drastic measures of elimination, not reform, of norms and related control bodies around the world have created debate. Striking for their dimension and systematic nature are Argentina and the USA: “… Trump buys and sells shares of companies that operate in sectors regulated by the government, those whose CEOs he receives at the White House, or takes with him on trips like the one in China in recent days. These are not the moves of an eighty-year-old gentleman who presides over the value of his own assets, but of a speculator who abuses privileged information. They are the moves of a financial criminal…” thus Feltri, Stefano., (01/06/2026) in his Newsletter Appunti;
“A clause inserted in a broader agreement establishes that the federal government will be “forever excluded” from pursuing tax disputes against the US president, his relatives, and his economic activities. Experts raise doubts about the legitimacy of the agreement, defining it as an “abuse of the judicial system” Molinari Elena, (20/05/2026) in Avvenire;
“CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], in September 2025 officially approved Polymarket’s activity in the US market, just a few days after Donald Trump Jr. joined the company’s advisory committee, in which he invested about 10 million dollars…” Crescenzi, Chiara., (06/05/2026) “Polymarket e i pericoli dei mercati predittivi” in Guerre di Rete;
“The climate emergency in the United States no longer exists, at least from a legislative point of view. Trump has eliminated the anti-pollution rules that concerned cars and trucks” AGI (13/02/2026) [emphasis in the original];
“He had promised it and here it is then arrived, among the first executive decrees issued by the second presidency of Donald Trump, the one that cancels the automatic acquisition of citizenship for the children of irregular migrants born on American soil” Muzio, Matteo., (23/01/2025) Il Foglio;
As an example regarding Italy, see the reduction of powers connected to the reform of the Court of Auditors (Law no. 1 of January 7, 2026) and to the official opinion of the United Sections of the same Court (Opinion no. 4/2025/CONS) and Resolution no. 27/SSRRCO/AUD/2026 (United Sections in control).
“Good norms are indispensable, but they do not hold up if there does not exist a democratic ethos that supports them, and the ethos, in turn, weakens if the laws do not protect it. Laws and customs, in democracy, live in reciprocal dependence: the corrosion of the former drags the latter with it”. Cartabia, Marta. Violante, Luciano. 2026. La democrazia non esiste in natura.. op.cit. p 26. - That is, they tend toward semantic and cognitive invariance on fundamental aspects and are able to com/prehend the new that advances. In this sense, stable and progressive political systems, not reactionary ones.
On the point, it seems to me a good example to cite the measure with which the Spanish government regularized the presence of 500,000 foreigners (perhaps 1,000,000, the figures vary greatly according to the sources, but here the decision matters more than the entity, even if important in itself). A measure of opposite tendency to the majority of the policies of the states of Europe on the point. The manifest purpose: to respond to demographic aging, integrate submerged workers into the Social Security system, and strengthen the country’s tax revenue. For what counts here, the definition of migrant that follows from one perspective or the other is different, and therefore the rhetoric, the legitimation, of rejection practices.
The case of the regularization of migrants in Spain is also—in my opinion—a calling into question of the narratives on liquid society and correlated consequences hypothesized by Bauman in his last works. - cfr. Greco, Tommaso. 2025. Critica della ragione Bellica. Bari-Roma: Laterza. pp 47 ss in particular and bibliography cited therein.
- We will return to this point with subsequent posts, but the reference is to critical criminology as in McGarry, Ross, and Sandra Walklate, (eds). 2016. The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War. London: Palgrave Macmillan; and McGarry, Ross, and Sandra Walklate. 2019. A Criminology of War? New Horizons in Criminology. Bristol University Press.; in addition to the one already cited, which is also an inspiration for this series of posts ‘Sotto la guerra’, Morin, Edgar. 2023. Di guerra in guerra. Dal 1940 all’Ucraina invasa. Trad. Riccardo Fedriga. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.; v. also Colombo Alessandro. (2026). “Il vizio dell’impunità”, Milano: Casa della Cultura di Milano the 2/4/26.
- The United Nations General Assembly recognized Palestine the status of non-member observer state through Resolution 67/19, approved on November 29, 2012.
Previously, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) held the status of observer entity (accorded with Resolution 3237 of November 22, 1974). - Respectively: Browning, Christopher R. 2022. Uomini comuni. Polizia tedesca e soluzione finale in Polonia. Torino: Einaudi.
Gavazzeni, Ezio (2026). I cecchini del weekend. L’inchiesta sui safari umani a Sarajevo, Roma: PaperFirst.
Arendt, Hannah. 2013. La banalità del male: Eichmann a Gerusalemme. Milano: Feltrinelli.
Zimbardo, Philip. 2008. L’effetto Lucifero: Cattivi si diventa? Come persone buone diventano malvagie. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
See also: for a sociological framing of war, the slides of Information and War: a sociological point of view (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, 2003), in particular the opening outline, from “war is a conflict of power, usually between two States” to “the management of information, understood as the construction of reality, therefore acquires extraordinary importance”, and the slide Sociology of War, based on Gallino, Luciano, Dizionario di sociologia [Dictionary of Sociology], Milan: TEA, entry “Guerra” [War] (in Italian; no English edition).
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– Last Updated on 26.10.26 by wv
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