SUMMARY:

In 2005 a several-week-long riot across multiple prison colonies in Kyrgyzstan culminated in a bloody standoff between a parliamentary delegation and the mafia syndicate known as the vory v zakone (thieves-in-law). With roots in the social upheaval of imperial Russia and gaining organizational strength and notoriety in the Soviet gulags, the vory control many aspects of prison life in Kyrgyzstan (and elsewhere in former Soviet countries), as well as the drug and weapons trades. Operating with their own legal code (the Understandings), their own justice system (skhodki) and their own taxation and redistribution system (obshchak), the vory operate very much like a parallel state in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing on legal geography and understandings of state power as performance, this article investigates the multiple sovereignties and forms of spatial power that are embodied in the blurred lines between law and criminality, state and mafia. We argue that the power of the vory rests not on their takeover of state structures – that is, not just on being thieves of the law – but on producing new spaces that make them thieves within the state’s law. The vory and the state are not opposed to one another, but rather co-constitute one another through the performance of governance and the establishment of multiple legal spaces.