Organized crime is still widespread. A body in Tijuana, Mexico, on November 17.

In theory, the 21st century is marked by 21st-century threats, like global terror networks and sophisticated cyber attacks. But in many places, the problems are more familiar, parochial and old-fashioned: drug dealing, prostitution, kidnapping and corruption, all the hallmarks of organized crime.
In developing countries, racketeering thrives on instability. But it can be hard to eradicate even in more prosperous and well-regulated places.
In Japan, for example, the criminal syndicates known as yakuza have been tolerated as regulators of gambling, sex trades and other shadowy enterprises, so long as they do not disturb the peace. But in the city of Kurume, residents protested when a factional feud among the Dojinkai, the local yakuza, led to shootouts in the street. As Norimitsu Onishi reported in The Times, more than 600 alarmed neighbors recently went to court to try to evict the Dojinkai from their six-story Kurume headquarters.
That kind of civic action is less likely in a country like Bulgaria, where widespread mob influence is assumed to infect the legal system itself. Iva Pushkarova, a lawyer and executive director of the Bulgarian Judges Association, told Doreen Carvajal of the Times that lawyers were well aware of judges with criminal ties.
“How do we know-” Ms. Pushkarova said. “They have marriage connections or business ties with organized criminal bosses. They are neighbors.”
In parts of Mexico, criminal gangs fueled by the booming drug trade have diversified into kidnapping for ransom. The nation’s affluent families have responded by hiring swarms of bodyguards for themselves and their children, donning designer clothes made of bulletproof material and, in some cases, leaving the country altogether.
“There’s an exodus, and it’s all about insecurity,” Guillermo Alonso Meneses, an anthropologist at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana, told Marc Lacey of The Times. “A psychosis has developed. There’s fear of getting kidnapped or killed.”
But in places where there is little government to speak of, anything organized can look like a boon, even crime. Consider the audacious pirates of Somalia: seizing freighters in poorly patrolled waters of the Indian Ocean - most recently, a Saudi-owned supertanker, the largest ship ever hijacked - they have built a lucrative business collecting ransoms in a region otherwise lacking for opportunity.
And in the eastern Congo, as Lydia Polgreen reported in The Times, a tin mining operation run by a renegade army brigade provides employment to hordes of miners and porters, and a certain level of assurance to their customers.
“To be honest, it is better for us that they are there,” said Bakwe Selomba, an ore purchaser. “I can send my buyers walking through the jungle with lots of money, but nobody will touch them as long as we pay the tax.”
The yakuza also claim to promote stability in Japan. But in Kurume, Nobuyuki Shinozuka, 54, the Dojinkai’s acting chairman, was philosophical about the lawsuit his group faces - and about the place of organized crime in any society. “It’s up to the state,” he told Mr. Onishi. “If the state feels it no longer needs us, it can pass a law banning the yakuza. But if it feels even a little bit that it still needs us, then we’ll find some way to survive.”