This volume examines the relationship between states and organized crime. It seeks to add to the theoretical literature for analyzing the criminalization of the state. The volume also explores the nature of organized crime in countries throughout the Americas from Central America to the Southern Cone.

Has Africa moved on from 'classical corruption? What are the political and economic origins of official implication in crime? What are the new frontiers of crime in South Africa?

While liberal-democratic states like America, Britain and Australia claim to value freedom of expression and the right to dissent, they have always actually criminalized dissent. This disposition has worsened since 9/11 and the 2008 Great Recession. This ground-breaking study shows that just as dissent involves far more than protest marches, so too liberal-democratic states have expanded the criminalization of dissent. Drawing on political and social theorists like Arendt, Bourdieu and Isin, the book offers a new way of thinking about politics, dissent and its criminalization relationally. Using case studies like the Occupy movement, selective refusal by Israeli soldiers, urban squatters, democratic education and violence by anti-Apartheid activists, the book highlights the many forms dissent takes along with the many ways liberal-democratic states criminalize it. The book highlights the mix of fear and delusion in play when states privilege security to protect an imagined ‘political order’ from difference and disagreement. The book makes a major contribution to political theory, legal studies and sociology. Linking legal, political and normative studies in new ways, Watts shows that ultimately liberal-democracies rely more on sovereignty and the capacity for coercion and declarations of legal ‘states of exception’ than on liberal-democratic principles. In a time marked by a deepening crisis of democracy, the book argues dissent is increasingly valuable.

Assembles leading theorists of a new paradigm of political theory, State Crimes Against Democracy , undertaking judicious and devoted hacking exposing the elusive nodes and circuitry that propagate elite dominance in world affairs, and what can be done to restore the demos to democracy.

This book offers a comprehensive, article-by-article legal commentary on the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and its Protocols on trafficking in persons, smuggling of migrants, and trafficking in firearms and ammunition. The Convention- often referred to by the acronym UNTOC- was approved by the UN General Assembly on 15 November 2000 and made available for governments to sign at a high-level conference in Palermo, the heartland of the Italian Mafia, on 12-15 December 2000. For this reason, UNTOC is sometimes also referred to as the 'Palermo Convention'. The Convention entered into force on 29 September 2003. The purpose of UNTOC is to promote cooperation to prevent and combat transnational organized crime more effectively. UNTOC seeks to promote consistency among national legal systems and set standards for domestic laws so that States parties can effectively combat transnational organized crime. UNTOC is supplemented by three protocols: the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Air, and Sea, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, and the Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, their Parts and Components, and Ammunition. Article by article, this books presents the text of each provision of the Convention and the Protocols, followed by a systematic analysis of their background and negotiating history, their interpretation by the Conference of the Parties and its working groups, in judicial decisions by domestic and international courts, , in the academic literature, and in official material published by international organisations, chief among them the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the guardian of UNTOC and the Protocols. The authors offer critical, scholarly commentary. The book serves as a compendium for those using, researching, or studying provisions under UNTOC and the Protocols and as a handbook for those charged with implementing and enforcing them.

Oil has been central to regime survival for oil states across the Arabian Peninsula and has been at the heart of their attempts to defuse the wave of Arab revolutions. However, in 2011 revolution hit Libya, the most oil dependent regime in the Middle East. The political storm winds that have swept this region have thrown into doubt the resilience of Arab rentier states, and highlight how the political effects of oil vary across the oil producing countries. Oil States in the New Middle East brings together leading experts to critically assess the centrality of oil and the relevance of Rentier State Theory in light of the post-2011 upheaval across the Middle East and North Africa. It combines overall reflections on the political dynamics in oil states with focused case investigations of individual countries. Taking as its starting point the centrality of oil in explanations of regime survival, the book analyses how the oil states have responded to and fared throughout the Arab popular upheavals, resulting in a critical assessment of the continued relevance of Rentier State Theory. While observers have asked how the uprisings varied between oil and non-oil states, this book turns the comparative focus inward, arguing for a more fine-grained understanding of the political effects of oil in different oil producing countries. This book would be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East, North Africa and Gulf Studies, Oil and Politics, as well as Comparative Politics and International Political Economy.

This work provides an authoritative survey of America's long and turbulent history of rebellions against laws and institutions of the state, ranging from violent acts of sedition and terrorism to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against discriminatory or unjust laws. Crimes against the State is an evenhanded and illuminating one-stop resource for understanding acts of rebellion against legal authorities and institutions and the motivations/goals driving them. Special care is taken to differentiate between hostile acts and actors that seek to overthrow or otherwise damage the state and/or targeted demographic groups through violence (such "bad actors" as the January 6 Capitol mob and bombers of abortion clinics) and acts and actors that seek to defy, reform, or improve laws and institutions of the state through nonviolent action (such "good actors" as activists in the civil rights movement). Within these pages, readers will 1) learn how to differentiate between sedition, insurrection, treason, domestic terrorism, espionage, and other acts meant to injure or overthrow the government; 2) gain a deeper understanding of laws, policies, and events that have aroused violent or nonviolent opposition; 3) gain a deeper understanding of the perspectives and motivations of both good actors and bad actors; and 4) learn about state responses to these challenges and threats, from martial law–style crackdowns to new laws and reforms.

This book examines the ‘war on terror’ and radicalization from an ontological, non-state centric perspective. Since 9/11, criminology has developed in its study of terrorism, utilising alternative non-state centric frameworks to uncover and make visible state-initiated harm. Although progress has been achieved, criminology has continued to privilege the state, thereby failing to uncover forms of state crime and how such crimes facilitate radicalization and terrorism. Ahmed aims to rectify this gap by demonstrating how crimes of the state have contributed to the existence of Islamist-inspired terrorism and the emergence of global Jihadist organisations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The ‘War on Terror’ abandons the dominant socially-constructed discourse and application of the ‘war on terror’ and instead favours a grounded approach whereby actors, actions and consequences are analysed according to the risk they represent. Ahmed achieves this grounded approach through situating state practices in international human rights law and international humanitarian law. Through documenting the intersectionality of these practices with radicalization in the emergence of global Jihadist organisations, the book demonstrates how state crimes contribute to terrorism. Although the book sits at the intersections of critical criminology, state crime, international/transnational crime, it is relevant to all disciplines that are concerned with state crime, terrorism and radicalization.

Firozsha Baag is an apartment building in Bombay. Its ceilings need plastering and some of the toilets leak appallingly, but its residents are far from desperate, though sometimes contentious and unforgiving. In these witty, poignant stories, Mistry charts the intersecting lives of Firozsha Baag, yielding a delightful collective portrait of a middle-class Indian community poised between the old ways and the new. "A fine collection...the volume is informed by a tone of gentle compassion for seemingly insignificant lives."--Michiko Kakutani,New York Times