Concluding Remarks

Abstract

The findings from the previous chapters reveal an intriguing and constantly evolving assemblage of public and private actors located in a country that has itself literally been in transition over the past 25 years — not only in political and economic terms (i.e., from a communist ruled and centrally planned autocracy toward a liberal free-market-oriented democracy) but also in legal, social, cultural, and mental terms (i.e., from ‘collective’ ownership, central planning, and the ‘if you do not steal from the state, you are stealing from your own family’ mantra to private ownership, invisible hand of the market, and the ‘running the state as a company’ mantra). In order to make sense of both the fluidity of this complex assemblage and the power struggles within it — as manifested by the abrupt rise and fall of fortune of the ABL’s founder’s plan to achieve a dominant market share by means of ‘uniform building of stable economic and political power’ — the Bourdieu-enhanced global security assemblages model proved to be a useful analytical device.