This new book by the well-known anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff explores the global preoccupation with criminality in the early twenty-first century, a preoccupation strikingly disproportionate, in most places and for most people, to the risks posed by lawlessness to the conduct of everyday life. Ours in an epoch in which law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcement are ever more critical registers in which societies construct, contest, and confront truths about themselves, an epoch in which criminology, broadly defined, has displaced sociology as the privileged means by which the social world knows itself. They also argue that as the result of a tectonic shift in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance, the meanings attached to crime and, with it, the nature of policing, have undergone significant change; also, that there has been a palpable muddying of the lines between legality and illegality, between corruption and conventional business; even between crime-and-policing, which exist, nowadays, in ever greater, hyphenated complicity. Thinking through Crime and Policing is, therefore, an excursion into the contemporary Order of Things; or, rather, into the metaphysic of disorder that saturates the late modern world, indeed, has become its leitmotif. It is also a meditation on sovereignty and citizenship, on civility, class, and race, on the law and its transgression, on the political economy of representation.

“The strength of this book is that it does not look at a single case or even a few disparate examples of drug, weapon, and human trafficking but looks at many patterns—intra-regionally, cross-nationally, and internationally. It is an innovative addition to the literature on the nature of the safe havens—or ‘black spots’—currently being used for illicit activity. This book will make a clear impact on the scholarship of transnational crime and the geopolitics of the illicit global economy.” —Jeremy Morris, Aarhus University, Denmark Transnational criminal, insurgent, and terrorist organizations seek places that they can govern and operate from with minimum interference from law enforcement. This book examines 80 such safe havens which function outside effective state-based government control and are sustained by illicit economic activities. Brown and Hermann call these geographic locations ‘black spots’ because, like black holes in astronomy that defy the laws of Newtonian physics, they defy the world as defined by the Westphalian state system. The authors map flows of insecurity such as trafficking in drugs, weapons, and people, providing an unusually clear view of the hubs and networks that form as a result. As transnational crime is increasing on the internet, Brown and Hermann also explore if there are places in cyberspace which can be considered black spots. They conclude by elaborating the challenges that black spots pose for law enforcement and both national and international governance.

An expose of what really goes on behind the closed doors of state power

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises. Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late-liberal nation-states.

Grappling specifically with the norm of sovereignty as responsibility, the book seeks to advance a critical constructivist understanding of norm development in international society, as opposed to the conventional – or liberal – constructivist (mis)understanding that still dominates the debate. Against this backdrop, the book delves into the institutionalization of sovereignty as responsibility within the lived practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). More to the point, the proposed exploration intends to revive questions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies, in order to devise an original framework to operationalize research on how – institutional – practice impinges on norm development. To this end, the book resorts to an original creole vocabulary, which combines the contributions of post-positivist constructivist scholars with the legacy of key post-modernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as critical approaches to International (Criminal) Law and Post-Colonial Studies. The book will appeal to scholars of international relations and international law, in addition to critical scholars more broadly, as well as to practitioners in the fields of human rights and international justice interested in normative theory and the implementation and contestation of international social norms.

This monograph examines North Korea's Office Number 39: its origins, organizational structure, and activities. The authors focus on Office Number 39's key illicit activities? to include manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs, the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Finally, as Kim Jong-Il grows frailer, assessing how his successor may continue or alter Office Number 39's activities is also examined. (Originally published by the Strategic Studies Institute)

North Korea's criminal conduct, smuggling, trafficking, and counterfeiting, is well known, but the organization directing it is understudied or overlooked. North Korea practices a form of "criminal sovereignty" that is unique in the contemporary international security arena. It uses state sovereignty to protect itself from external interference in its domestic affairs while dedicating a portion of its government to carrying out illicit international activities in defiance of international law and the domestic laws of numerous other nations. The proceeds of these activities are used in a number of ways to sustain North Korea's existence and to enable other policies. The authors of this monograph focus on North Korea's Office #39 as the state apparatus that directs illicit activities to include the manufacture and distribution of illegal drugs, the counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and the manufacture and distribution of counterfeit cigarettes. Finally, as Kim Jong-Il becomes more frail, the authors assess how his successor may continue or alter Office #39's activities.--