But there in Calabria, when the state seizes an asset, a building, a business, a plot of land, who's actually feeling that? Who benefits? Who loses? Does the community even know what happened?

really good question i feel compelled to say that i love calabria it's one of the most beautiful places in the world i care for it immensely and it gets a really bad rap and a lot of media reports so i do need to stick that flag in the ground before i go on but mafias thrive as you'll be aware mafias thrive in areas where there's already very low public confidence in state institutions and this is long held and in the case of the italian mafias goes back over a century this is really deeply embedded stuff and this is what helps embed their power in the first place So if we look at mafia power as being built on two central pillars, one of those is territorial control and governance, and the other is a level of social consensus in the communities that they're governing.

And that can be achieved in a few different ways.

For example, providing employment opportunities where historically these have been few and far between, or...

Off the top of my head, an example you might have seen in the press a few years ago during COVID, some of the Sicilian mafia groups were handing out food parcels where people were hard up and out of work.

They're not doing this out of the good of their hearts.

These are not benevolent organisations.

which is a word i often use so to help that you're conducting your study and you've just secured funding from the ncaa and from the home office through the asset recovery incentivization scheme or aris to study whether asset recovery actually deters offenders and disrupts criminal networks can you explain aris how it works what it funds and why it's being used to fund this research and how that's notable