The result is a gripping read about the ordinariness of extortion beyond conventional organised crime and mafia spheres. The chapters document how the strength of extortion lies in the gradual and complicit inclusion of individuals and populations within relationships that are simultaneously attractive and violent – capturing the overlapping dimensions of compulsion and choice that define so many of today’s livelihoods. In doing so, this book illustrates the dynamics of coercion, force and consent, and offers a fresh perspective on economic violence that moves away from exclusive legalistic definitions of extortion.

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Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions focuses on the sharp end of criminal abuses and brings together contributors from across different perspectives, disciplines, backgrounds and geographies. It offers both practical guidance and critical reflections on the promises and pitfalls of evaluation for anti-trafficking interventions. The book also introduces foundational theory and practice around evaluations (including both qualitative and quantitative evidence), highlights innovative new directions and draws lessons from real-world case studies. It is designed to function both as a practical companion guide and to stimulate reflection on the tensions and constraints of funding, doing and assessing evaluations in this domain. Combining an accessible style, an applied focus and academic rigour, this book has much to offer practitioners, policymakers, students, academics and others working in different settings worldwide.

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The volume comprises a broad range of chapters from scholars across the social sciences and humanities, using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions and analytic approaches to explore the efficacy and valence of ‘smuggling’ or ‘contraband’ as a lens onto modes of personhood, materiality, statehood and political (dis)connection across Latin America. This material is presented through a combination of historic documentation and contemporary ethnographic research across the region to highlight the genesis and development of these cultural practices whilst grounding them in the capitalist and colonial refashioning of the entire region from the sixteenth century to the present day.

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The main aim of Violent Affections is to explore the social mechanisms and techniques that impact anti-queer violence evidenced in the reviewed cases. Alexander Sasha Kondakov expands upon two sets of interdisciplinary literature – queer theory and affect theory – in order to conceptualise what is referred to as neo-disciplinary power. Taking the empirical observations from Russia as a starting point, he develops an original explanation of how contemporary power relations are changing from those of late modernity as envisioned by Foucault’s Panopticon to neo-disciplinary power relations of a much more fragmented, fluid and unstructured kind – the Memeticon.
The book traces how exactly affections circulate from body to body as a kind of virus and eventually invade the body that responds with violence. In this analytic effort, it draws on the arguments from memetics – the theory of how pieces of information pass on from one body to another as they thrive to survive by continuing to resonate. This work makes the argument truly interdisciplinary.

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Jeremy Bentham on Police celebrates this achievement by exploring the story of Bentham’s writings on police and considering their relevance to the past, present and future of criminology. After Scott Jacques introduces the book, the Director of the Bentham Project, Philip Schofield, describes and explains how it works. Then Michael Quinn, who brought together Bentham’s writings on police, delves into the personal and socio-historical background in which they were created. An extract follows, representing the most (criminologically-)relevant passages from Bentham’s police writings. Finally, a rich variety of scholars offer their thoughts on what those writings mean for criminology. These contributions come from Anthony A. Braga, Ronald Clarke, David J. Cox, Stephen Douglas, Stephen Engelmann, G. Geltner, Joel F. Harrington, Jonathan Jacobs, Paul Knepper, Gloria Laycock, Gary T. Marx, Daniel S. Nagin, Graeme R. Newman, Pat O’Malley, Eric L. Piza, Kim Rossmo, Lucia Summers and Dean Wilson.

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By pioneering the field-study of the politicisation of economic crime, and disrupting the wider literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East aims to influence future research agendas through its case for the study of mafia-enterprises and their engagement with governance in South Asia and outside. Its empirical and theoretical contribution to debates about economic crimes in democratic regimes will be of critical value to researchers in Economics, Anthropology, Sociology, Comparative Politics, Political Science and International Relations, Criminologists and Development Studies, as well as to those inside and outside academia interested in current affairs and the relationship between crime, politics and mafia enterprises.

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In Grey Area, Scott Jacques examines the regulations with a huge stash of data, which he collected during two years of fieldwork in Amsterdam. How do coffeeshop owners and staff obey the rules? How are the rules broken? Why so? To what effect? The stories and statistics show that order in the midst of smoke is key to Dutch drug policy, vaporising the idea that prohibition is better than regulation. Grey Area is a timely contribution in light of the blazing reform to cannabis policy worldwide.

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