obviously so. the Italian mafia is said to exist because the local (legal) system of distributing punishment was ineffective/unfair. modern what we call "democratic systems" will paint a different story - they will tell you these people were unable to live in peace until they came along.
it's where the parallel ends though. my comment certainly was _not_ an endorsement or fetishization of crime, just an observation from my own experience living there. the alternative view point which is to call everyone who hasn't been integrated into a "civilized system" a crook (or backwards) is too imperialistic for my taste, especially since Thailand is also the home of many hill-tribes who have a natural difficult relationship with empire-building city folk.
Shqiperia (Albania) is run by the Besa code. It is still feudal today since neither the Italians, Communists, or Ottomans have been able to rule the country. The Besa code was able to hide the Jews from the Nazis when every other european country would turn them in. Today, the Besa code allows Shqiperia to serve as Europe's leading marijuana supplier. 75% of the population is agrarian based, children learn organic farm work ethic, and the family still reigns
The cannabis produced there ends up mostly in the EU (via Montenegro by ship to Italy or the land route via Croatia). EU countries simply pay more for weed then potatoes so it's the market working as expected IMO (but sadly also as intended). The way to address this is to legalize it like Portugal which curbed addiction rates and freed up the legal system with more important work.
Law enforcement is effectively just the use of (threatened or actual) violence in a way that society has agreed is accepted. The police for (and similar entities) in many modern countries are just the group that has a monopoly on that accepted use a violence.
It seems like what's being described _is_ the rule of law for that area, just not the rule of law most people expect.
Writing from the US: parallels to organized crime abounds in law enforcement here as well. Look what happened to Adrian Schoolcraft [1]
> After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was repeatedly harassed by members of the NYPD and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, an ESU unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days.
The issue is that people here assume things like this are exceptional rather than systemic.
yes this was exactly what I wanted to say. the local norms have over time become illegal and many regions still have a combination of both.
Say ... if a local person was just arriving on the island, without any reference (would be an odd thing to do but for the sake of argument[1]) this person then (hypothetically) gets robbed at the pier, his next stop isn't the police who might end up beating him or finding ways to extort him, but they would visit whoever ran the village. They would beg for work, and they'll chat about who they might know in common, and find an arrangement (maybe even find the offender and get their stuff back). The police would be the last place they'd go to not only because they're corrupt but because it would potentially make the village elder who is actually in power lose a little face.
[1] it's risky traveling being both without reference AND poor. especially poor folk would do everything in their power to arrange with people at their destination about their visit. so a job seeker turning up at the police saying they've been robbed would raise a lot of questions. (the person might be a good shoe-in for case they have open since a while and are still looking for a suspect).
The interaction between organized crime and formal law, nation to nation, is absolutely fascinating. The more I learn about it, the more fascinating it gets.
I'm adding this story to what I've learned about the history of the yakuza in Japan and the various US mafia, gangs, and crime families.
