Review of Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy and Political Collapse Robert J. Bunker 1 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016 Gangster States by Katherine Hirschfeld, an Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma is part of a large offering of International Political Economy series titles produced by Palgrave Macmillan. A book like this can easily become overlooked and quickly forgotten as a byproduct of such numerous titles. Hirschfeld, however, has produced a gem of a work that is both multidisciplinary in its approach and intellectually seductive. Within the context of traditional organized crime studies, its amoral analytics may be viewed as highly disruptive—almost heretical—in nature. Contrarian and well executed works such as this should be greatly valued for their ‘out of the box’ perspectives and ability to shake up what can at times become an insular and dogmatic discipline. The core thesis of the book B…is that models from evolutionary biology (specifi- cally behavioral ecology) are more useful than prevailing models in economics for understanding the evolution of organized crime and racketeering in unregulated eco- nomic systems.^ (p. 5). This presupposes no moral judgments concerning criminal organizations but instead is derived from the perspective that Darwinian natural selection is at work under certain environmental conditions—specifically in times of Bstatelessness^ (p. 5). As a result, the withdrawal of governmental regulations and institutions can create opportunities for organized crime to fill the political void that has been created. In the model proposed and developed by Hirschfeld, both upperworld and underworld rationality is in play. While the upperworld is focused on the B…protection of private property and individual rights…^ (at least in liberal democratic societies) within formal economic structures, the underworld B…creates monopolies and aggre- gates wealth into the hands of monopolistic gangsters^ within the illicit economy (p. 3). However, no B…vocabulary to describe and predict the evolution of territorial underworld monopoly enforcement^ exists (p. 3). Given the reality over the growing power of Putin’ s Russian kleptocracy, organized crime from Mexico corrupting U.S. Trends Organ Crim DOI 10.1007/s12117-016-9283-2 * Robert J. Bunker Docbunker.warlord@gmail.com 1 430 University Circle, Claremont, CA 91711, USA