Revised version of papers presented at a conference held at New Delhi during 9-11 February 2004.

A critical look at the terrifying ways the police are used to control'surplus' populations worldwide.

What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Based on the analysis of five post-Soviet countries that have officially embarked on police reform efforts, Erica Marat examines various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.

Probing the relationship between German political economy and everyday fiscal administration, The Disordered Police State focuses on the cameral sciences—a peculiarly German body of knowledge designed to train state officials—and in so doing offers a new vision of science and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Andre Wakefield shows that the cameral sciences were at once natural, technological, and economic disciplines, but, more important, they also were strategic sciences, designed to procure patronage for their authors and good publicity for the German principalities in which they lived and worked. Cameralism, then, was the public face of the prince's most secret affairs; as such, it was an essentially dishonest enterprise. In an entertaining series of case studies on mining, textiles, forestry, and universities, Wakefield portrays cameralists in their own gritty terms. The result is a revolutionary new understanding about how the sciences created and maintained an image of the well-ordered police state in early modern Germany. In raising doubts about the status of these German sciences of the state, Wakefield ultimately questions many of our accepted narratives about science, culture, and society in early modern Europe.

The Police, State and Society: Perspectives from India and France is a parallel study between criminal justice systems in India and France. It covers the institutional, democratic and functional aspects of the police and law in the two countries. It discusses the modern aspects of policing and human rights issues in the criminal justice system against a backdrop of violence and conflict. It is useful for students and scholars of sociology, law, criminal justice, political science policymakers and general readers.

Originally published in 1981 Law, State and Society confronts many of the most important issues within the developing field of law and society. The essays cover the key political debates and the subject of the sociology of law through two key debates, the first tackling the wider theoretical and political system, while the other essays are concerned with more concrete aspects of both the political and social face of law. Together, the essays show how crucial the potential is that exists for a considerable extension and integration of work that focuses explicitly on empirical problems, yet is at the same time more conscious of the theoretical issues that underpin the effectivity of law.