Francesco Sidoti

Francesco Sidoti (Sicily, 22 March 1948) is an Italian sociologist and criminologist, docteur du troisième cycle (École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), and professor emeritus at the Università degli Studi dell'Aquila. He has worked with Norberto Bobbio at Centro studi di scienza politica Paolo Farneti, in Turin, and was a guest scholar at Brookings Institution, in Washington DC.

Disastered modernity

Sidoti is the precursor in his country (and probably in the world) of academic courses on criminal investigation – searching, interviews, interrogations, evidence collection and preservation, etc. – as applied science to the study of facts that inform court cases. The focus of those courses were not forensics exclusively but essentially criminal investigation in democratic societies as related to the level of civic awareness, faulty criminal inquiries, legal blunders etc. Sidoti has worked in that respect within the “limits of public rationality” and their impacts on individuals and institutions, thereby arriving at the notion of a ‘disastered modernity’ and its sudden, destructive, unforeseen consequences.

″Expressions such as ‘disaster capitalism’ or ‘disastered modernity’ are in contrast to Zygmunt Bauman’s famous notion of ‘liquid/ late modernity’, which in spite of being useful conveys an idea of a pleasant place where people shift from one social status to another in a ‘fluid’ manner – like day trippers changing home, partners, jobs, values, political and sexual orientation. The idea of a ‘disastered modernity’, on the other hand, replicate Anthony Giddens’ 1999 BBC Reith Lectures, when he doubted that citizens could "bring our runaway world to heel" without confronting those who profit directly from the chaos. He is among other illustrious pessimists, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who spoke of a world seemingly "out of our control", like an airplane on automatic pilot, speeding continuously but with no secure destination″.

The solution, according to Sidoti, is to encourage a “specific form of cosmopolitanism”, one in which cultural and artistic activities are not restrained by national or parochial boundaries – based “not on ideals but on a state of necessity”. He goes on to conclude that even though “globalization seems ungovernable it remains nonetheless the only chance we have [considering that] only a cosmopolitan perspective can reunite humanity with nature”.

On investigation and democracy

Sidoti specifically conceives investigation as a search for accountability – it is about personal liability for something peculiar or anomalous that has not hitherto been explained. Investigation is not necessarily a search about crime, but an attempt to uncover who’s accountable for an unsolved mystery, puzzle, problem or abnormality. Seeing from that perspective, differently from research – which is careful study of a given subject, field, or problem, undertaken to discover facts or principles – investigation presupposes the possibility of creating an ‘enemy’ and it is thus often on the verge of risk and retribution.

An individual investigation may concern situations and operations likely to present specific assessments and is therefore subject to prior checking. It may range from risk analysis to computer crimes, from organized crime to unsystematic crime, from serial killers to environmental disasters, from journalism to independent supervisory authorities. Good democracy is always based, just as investigative procedures, on checks and balances. The same goes for congressional hearings and free journalism, so there is no true investigation without an open society and without a spirit of critical, democratic rationalization.

On intelligence and intelligence failures

The English word ‘intelligence’ is derived from the Latin intus-legere, to choose, single out or separate wheat from chaff (Gospel of Matthew, 13:24-30). There is no intelligence without an ability to learn from failures, so intelligence must be differentiated from "understanding" and “then transformed and used in an even more intense and new sense”. The greater the intelligence the lower its failures, a case typically arising in a ten-year research project on Turkey, “one of the worst geopolitical failures of our time”.

″Nowadays Turkey seems to some observers the greatest example of an immense failure, aggravated and surrounded by many other Middle Eastern failures, where millions of people have been killed and trillions of dollars have been lost, robbed to medicine, education, infrastructures, and civilization″.

Critical response

Mary Gibson has compared Istituzioni e criminalità to David Garland’s Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory, and says that Sidoti places Italian debates on crime in the international context. In the same mood, Osvaldo Croci reviewed Sidoti's Morale e metodo nell’intelligence saying that whereas "few Italian academics have devoted attention to the study of security and intelligence [and] popular media has contemptuously tended to dismiss these issues as something fascist or of the right”, Sidoti on the contrary “weaves an intricate, and intriguing web of themes which together make a compelling case for the need to take security and intelligence issues seriously”.

Selected bibliography

Sidoti F. (1979), L'apprentissage d'une institution. Mouvements et bureaux dans les régions italiennes, École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Sidoti F. (1981), I limiti della razionalità pubblica, Evoluzionisti e razionalisti nella teoria sociologia, Edizioni di Comunità, Milano.

Sidoti F. (1991), Terrorism Supporters in the West: the Italian Case, in N. Gal-Or (ed), Tolerating Terrorism in the West. An International Survey, Routledge, London.

Sidoti F. (1992), The Extreme Right in Italy, in P. Hainsworth (ed), The Extreme Right in Europe and in the USA, Frances Pinter, London.

Sidoti F. (1993a), Italy: A Clean-up after the Cold War, Government and Opposition, 28, 1.

Sidoti F. (1993b), The Italian Political Class, Government and Opposition, 28, 3.

Sidoti F. (1993c), Criminals, Monsters, Human Rights, in Mediterranean Journal of Human Rights, 3.

Sidoti F. (1993d), Italy after the Cold War, The Italian Journal, vol. VII, 52nd Government Dossier Special Double Issue.

Sidoti F. (1994a), La Justice juvenile et la mafia, in Gazeau, J.-F. Peyre, V., La justice réparatrice et les jeunes. IX journées internationales de criminologie juvénile, Ministère de la Justice, Vaucresson.

Sidoti F. (1994b), The Significance of the Italian Election, Government and Opposition, 29, 3.

Sidoti F. (1996), Istituzioni e criminalità, Cedam, Padova.

Sidoti F. (1997), Anti Formalistic Reasonings on Corruption: Yesterday and Tomorrow, in 서유럽에 대한 연구의 잡, Hankuk University for Foreign Studies.

Sidoti F. (1998), Morale e metodo nell’intelligence, Cacucci, Bari.

Sidoti F., Tribuzio G. (2003), Le sfide dell'Asia. Modelli educativi a confronto, Il Cerchio,

Sidoti F. (2007), Gli anglosassoni a Cuba da Churchill a Bush, in Intelligence & Storia, pp. 17-40.

Sidoti F. (2009a), The Italian Secret Services, in A.V., Geheimdienste in Europa, VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Sidoti F., Gammone M. (2009b), "The Sociological Intervention", in Kincal R. (ed.). International Symposium on Democracy and Democracy Education in Europe, Nobel Yayn, Istanbul.

Sidoti F. (2012), Il crimine all'italiana. Una tradizione realista, garantista, mite, Guerini, Milano.

Sidoti, F. Gammone M. (2013), Che cosa significa essere europeo? Una ricerca al cuore e ai confini dell’Europa, FrancoAngeli, Milano.

Sidoti F. (2015a), The Rebirth of Classical Europe. What does it mean to be a European?, in Politeya, 1.

Sidoti F. (2015b), Ideal and Geopolitical Borders, in Aa.Vv., Contemporary Studies in Humanities, Ehrmann Verlag, Frankfurt.

Sidoti F (2015c), Palermo and Moscow. A Mafia Stereotype, in Nauka i Drustvo, vol. Број 2, 2015 (zima)/Issue 2, 2015 (winter).

Sidoti F., M. Ali Icbay, H. Arslan (eds) (2016), Research on Cultural Studies, Peter Lang, Bern.

Sidoti F, (2016a), Westernization and de-Westernization in Turkey, in K. Bieniek (ed.), RepublikaTurcji. Polityka Zagraniczna I Wewnetrzna, Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Krakow.

Sidoti F., Gammone M., Ciotti M., Manqing Fang (2017) (a cura di), La Criminalità in Italia e in Cina, Ghaleb, Roma.

Sidoti F., Gammone M., Veneziano C. (2018), I Carabinieri e l'identità italiana, Ets, Pisa.

Sidoti F. (2019a), Estremi d'odio, d'amore e d'amicizia, Linea, Padua.

Sidoti F. (2019b), Intelligence Failures: The Turkish Case, Linea, Padua.

Sidoti F., Gammone M. (2019c), A remissão dos pecados. Na cadeia com mafiosos, estrangeiros e operadores penitenciários, in Revista Sociologia Jurídica, Número 29 – Julho/Dezembro 2019.