Arising from Soviet prison camps in the 1930s, career criminals known as 'thieves-in-law' exist in one form or another throughout post-Soviet countries and have evolved into major transnational organized criminal networks since the dissolution of the USSR. Intriguingly, this criminal fraternity established a particular stronghold in the republic of Georgia where, by the 1990s, they had formed a mafia network of criminal associations that attempted to monopolize protection in both legal and...

The Soviet Gulag was one of the largest, most complex, and deadliest systems of incarceration in the 20th century. What lessons can we learn from its network of labor camps and prisons and exile settlements, which stretched across vast geographic expanses, included varied institutions, and brought together inmates from all the Soviet Union's ethnicities, professions, and social classes?Drawing on a massive body of documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Ide...

The violence of Mao's China is well known, but its extreme form is not. In 1967 and 1968, during the Cultural Revolution, collective killings were widespread in rural China in the form of public execution. Victims included women, children, and the elderly. This book is the first to systematically document and analyze these atrocities, drawing data from local archives, government documents, and interviews with survivors in two southern provinces. This book extracts from the Chinese case les...

In this original, bottom-up account of the evolution of contemporary Russia, Alena Ledeneva seeks to reveal how informal power operates. Concentrating on Vladimir Putin's system of governance - referred to as sistema - she identifies four key types of networks: his inner circle, useful friends, core contacts and more diffuse ties and connections. These networks serve sistema but also serve themselves. Reliance on networks enables leaders to mobilise and to control, yet they also lock polit...

Power has been compared to the weather: people discuss it all the time, but very few really understand it. This book seeks to demystify this complex concept by providing students with an incisive and engaging introduction to the shifting configurations of power in the contemporary global order.Drawing on the work of leading international relations scholars, philosophers and sociologists, the analysis goes beyond simplistic views of power as material capability, focusing also on its...

This book argues that Putin's strategy for rebuilding the state was fundamentally flawed. Taylor demonstrates that a disregard for the way state officials behave toward citizens - state quality - had a negative impact on what the state could do - state capacity. Focusing on those organizations that control state coercion, what Russians call the 'power ministries', Taylor shows that many of the weaknesses of the Russian state that existed under Boris Yeltsin persisted under Putin. Drawing o...

Crime and punishment are social and cultural manifestations; they are closely bound up with people's perceptions of morality, norms and values. In this book, Nils Christie argues that crime is a fluid and shallow concept - acts that could be construed as criminal are unlimited and crime is therefore in endless supply. It should not be forgotten that there are alternatives, both in the definition of crime, and in responses to it.A Suitable Amount of Crime looks at the great...

Genocide has emerged as one of the leading problems of the twentieth century. No corner of the world seems immune from this form of collective violence. While many individuals are familiar with the term, few people have a clear understanding of what genocide is and how it is carried out. This book clearly discusses the concept of genocide and dispels the widely held misconceptions about how these crimes occur and the mechanisms necessary for its perpetration.Genocidal Crimes

Recently, a wall was built in eastern Germany. Made of steel and cement blocks, topped with razor barbed wire, and reinforced with video monitors and movement sensors, this wall was not put up to protect a prison or a military base, but rather to guard a three-day meeting of the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8). The wall manifested a level of security that is increasingly commonplace at meetings regarding the global economy. The authors of Shutting Down the Streets have directl...

During the Soviet era, blat—the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures—was necessary to compensate for the inefficiencies of socialism. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a new generation of informal practices. In How Russia Really Works, Alena V. Ledeneva explores practices in politics, business, media, and the legal sphere in Russia in the 1990s—from the hiring of firms to create negative publicity about on...

International crime and justice is an emerging field that covers international and transnational crimes that have not been the focus of mainstream criminology or criminal justice. This book examines the field from a global perspective. It provides an introduction to the nature of international and transnational crimes and the theoretical perspectives that assist in understanding the relationship between social change and the waxing and waning of the crime opportunities resulting from globa...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, conflict in the former USSR has been a key concern in international security. This book fills a gap in the literature on violent conflict, evaluating a region that contains all the modern ingredients for instability and aggression. Bringing together leading experts on war and security, the book addresses current debates in international relations about power, interests, globalisation and the politics of identity as major drivers of contemporary war. ...