The symbiosis of politics and crime in Lithuania

Abstract

The article argues that since the mid 1990s organized crime in Lithuania has undergone significant transformation. During the early 1990s organized crime was characterized by groups challenging the state in the process of privatization of state property. At this time the most important mode of organized criminal activities was coercion, intimidation and violence. Since the mid 1990s the degree of violence typical to organized criminality has declined significantly. Instead organized crime associations have became active in attempting to partially appropriate the state by influencing, bribing and corrupting state actors. Membership of organized crime associations also underwent changes. Formally a number of prominent crime groups were made up of socially homogenous, lower class “outsiders” who used violence as the primary means of domination and enrichment. Contemporary criminal associations typically are comprised of informal networks of individuals of higher socio-economic standing, who are influential in a wide range of domains: legal and illegal, state and private, bureaucracy and private enterprise. Instead of violence a multiplicity of interactions and transactions among these elite networks are utilized to enable, transact, exchange and enhance mutually beneficial influence and criminal enrichment. We explore the dynamics that have facilitated the emergence of the postmodern organized crime associations that have gained legitimate and illegitimate social and political standing and influence within Lithuania. To illustrate the organized crime transformation the most recent political crisis, involving President Paksas' office engagement in corruption and organized crime, is analyzed. The implications of the transformation in organized crime for the criminal justice system in the country are discussed.     

Keeping it in the family: prosecuting incest in colonial Queensland

Abstract

This article examines forty-six criminal charges of lineal family sex crime in Queensland between 1870 and 1900. It finds that the special incest provisions introduced with increases to the age of consent in 1891 did not radically alter prosecution practices of father-daughter rape. While the new law did bring more cases before the courts, persisting cultural attitudes about the character and respectability of working-class girls, the dynamics of families under exaggerated paternal control, and the inviolability of the colonial family home continued to affect patterns of abuse and the regulation of incest in the last decade of the nineteenth century.     

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACT

This article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.     

Human rights practices and the Indonesian middle class

Abstract

During the New Order we have often witnessed or read in the newspapers or at least heard from various circles about KOPKAMTIB actions such as banning or ordering coverage of a story in the mass media through only a telephone call; carrying out arrests, detention, and interrogation against citizens without regard to the proper procedures delineated in law; inhumane treatment during questioning; carrying out executions performed without regard to legal procedures, more commonly known as “mysterious shootings”; undertaking “political screening” of citizens to determine their loyalty to the government as in the case of prospective nominees in the General Elections; depriving citizens of their civil rights without trial, such as forbidding signatories to the Petition of 50 to leave the country and depriving them of the ability to earn a living by instructing all agencies and state banks not to honor their requests; the arrest and detention of religious teachers and so forth. All of this has been done with the excuse that the individuals involved are suspected of engaging in extremist or other subversive acts.     

Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity,Phantasm, Japan by Marilyn Ivy

Abstract

Discourses of the Vanishing has been anticipated for several years now; it won't disappoint. Despite the rising number of authors who seek to “explain” Japan or attack its essentialism, Ivy is one of the few who have the understanding of modernity and the methodological tools to excavate the celebration (Japanese and American) of Japan's “uniqueness.” Discourses is by far one of the most sophisticated inquiries into what Ivy calls—properly I believe—the “Japanese thing.” The juxtaposition between the singular, thing, and plural, discourses, suggests her overall theme: to discuss the always incomplete reconfigurations of the many pasts that have existed within the archipelago into a singular ideology of Japan.     

The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism,Populism and Neoliberalisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.     

Chile's Criminal Law Reform: Enhancing Defendants' Rights and Citizen Security

Many democratic governments in Latin America have implemented broad judicial reforms, some of which are aimed at making criminal law and legal institutions more transparent and modern. Although such reforms are important for democratic development, scholars debate whether the reforms result in more rights for defendants and whether they jeopardize citizens' perceptions about security. Using two original datasets and a fixed‐effects model, this study shows that groundbreaking criminal law reforms in Chile have improved certain aspects of defendants' rights by decreasing the number of individuals in pretrial detention. Chileans' perceptions about crime and violence in regions where the reforms were implemented also have improved. Chile's success appears to be due to the government's commitment to the reforms, as well as to concerted and consistent efforts by the police to fight crime. These results have implications for other countries implementing similar significant reforms.     

The International Criminal Court and the Darfur crimes: The dilemma of peace and supra-national criminal justice

ABSTRACT

The supra-national criminal prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of the alleged crimes committed in Darfur raises critical legal and conceptual issues. This article addresses the dilemma of peace, justice and reconciliation from a legal perspective, as well as the justice options that are available. The article also assesses the Sudan's criminal and military laws (both at the substantive and procedural levels) in terms of the country's ability to prosecute international crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. In this respect, the article argues that these laws fall short of international criminal law standards and principles – particularly the amendments introduced after the United Nations Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the ICC. The article critically examines the Sudan government's policy of non-engagement, which ultimately led to supra-national criminal prosecution (represented by the ICC intervention under the complementarity principle of the Rome Statute). Finally, the article interrogates the report issued by the African Union High-Level Panel on Darfur (AUPD), and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of its recommendations.     

Institutional Abuse: A Long History

ABSTRACT

This article explores the long history of institutions for children in Australia and of the existence of abuse within them. By examining the function that such institutions were designed to perform, and the forms and structures that were devised to best achieve such purposes, the article argues that abuse was all too often not simply inherent in, but essential to, institutional operation. It pays particular attention to the classification of children deemed to be in need of institutional “care” and shows how, through a process of “othering”, their institutionalisation too often rendered them vulnerable to abuse.     

Migration Crisis,Organised Crime and Domestic Politics in Italy: Unfolding the Interplay

ABSTRACT

Focusing on Italy in the years of the ‘migration crisis’ between 2013 and 2017, this article explores how migration, crime groups and the domestic politics of migration control became entangled in times of crisis. Departing from previous theoretical discussions, it builds a framework that combines crime groups’ actions with domestic political processes in host countries and explores how the crime-migration nexus shaped – and was shaped by – Italian migration policymaking. The article contends that in the context of crisis the nexus took on new forms and that Italian migration politics and policies served to foster rather than counter the phenomenon, in a continuous interplay between criminal practices and policy choices.     

A Youth Counter-Narrative on Trafficking and Smuggling from Africa to Europe

This article features the personal experiences of a young African woman victim of trafficking and smuggling from Nigeria to Italy. The aim of the article is to provide a counter-narrative on the phenomenon of human trafficking, by engaging with the youth’s lived experiences. The story forms part of a wider database of youth counter-narratives, gathered by the authors in different parts of the world (Italy, South Africa, and Ethiopia). The narrative will be discussed on the basis of four identified elements, and the reflection addresses them within the wider context of trafficking, smuggling, and human migration. The conclusion drawn is that the language of youth counter-narratives can represent a useful tool to address the complexity of social issues, in particular when they refer to lived experiences of youngsters who have been subjected to different forms of oppression and violence. It also represents a sort of liberation from cultural homogenisation, forcing the readers to engage with a “new humanism.”     

A Triptych in honour of the cultural revolution

Abstract

Here are three valuable books which sincerely try to understand the Cultural Revolution and make it understandable to Westerners. They avoid theoretical juggling as well as picturesqueness for its own sake. None of these books takes for granted what a certain rhetorical type of Chinese propaganda states with overflowing phraseology, nor do they indulge in the kind of trifling questions characteristic of many Western commentators, such as: Is Chou En-lai losing ground? Is there a rift between the Secretariat and the Politburo? A rebirth of regionalism? and so on. The authors' most obvious concession to Western “bourgeois-educated” readers is that they try to avoid jargonistic Marxism, and to explain even the doctrinal grounds of the Cultural Revolution with plain words; but maybe it could be argued. that they only apply Chairman Mao's teachings in opposition to the “eight-legged essay style.” As for the “socialist-educated” reader, I should add that the authors also escape flatulent psychoanalysis and sociology.     

Review essay: Agrarian transformation,agrarian struggles,and Marxist analyses of the peasantry

Abstract

After some years of living in an Indian village, on family land that by the standards of most Marxist scholars puts us in the category of “capitalist farmers” or “kulaks,” I find myself taking scholarly discussion of “agrarian transformation” and “agrarian class structure” quite personally. There is something that jars against the reality of a daily life that includes hauling water for household use in the morning, enduring frequent blackouts or “load sheddings,” trying to decide whether to purchase first a TV or a refrigerator or a washing machine and not really being able to afford any of them, to be told that in moving from a salaried position in a U.S. university to an Indian village one has made a class jump upwards, from a section of the “expanded working class” or at worst “petty bourgeoisie” to membership among the capitalists and even (according to some scholars) participation in India's “ruling bloc.”     

From the Subject of Evil to the Evil Subject: “Cultural Difference” in Postapartheid South African Crime Fiction

This article takes up the question of “crime writing” and rejoins the debate around whether such literature stands in for the “political novel” in postapartheid South Africa. What social function might crime writing be serving? Research by political economists and cultural anthropologists suggests that acts of writing in “social detection” mode (rather than “crime writing”) serve as an allegory for occulted sociopolitical conditions. Cultural difference is seen, once again, to play a pivotal role in the legitimation of power, and writers in the detection mode are correspondingly seen to be probing the possibility of a resurgence of “bad” difference. This notion, it is argued, is a key differentiator in an otherwise murky scene in which the borderline between licit and illicit, and right and wrong, has become obscure. While many South African writers are brought into the discussion, including but not restricted to crime authors, a key novel by leading crime writer Deon Meyer is read as a case study to illustrate the more general points made in the article.     

What History Cannot Write: Bei Dao and Recent Chinese Poetry

An examination of the dictates and implications of contemporary counter-terrorism in the United States, this article analyzes the rhetorical tropes, historical precursors, and political valences of the “war on terrorism” as they pertain to the nature of sovereignty, the status of law, and the formation of political subjectivity. Building from a consideration of the demonological discourse on terrorism and the history of counterterrorism during the cold war, the article turns to the contingent sovereignty conferred to other states in the Bush administration's NationalSecurity Strategy and as borne out by its recent foreign policy and military actions. It notes a parallel development within domestic politics since September 11, as the administration seeks to consolidate sovereign authority against the other branches of government, evidenced most clearly in contests with the judiciary over the legitimacy of military tribunals and the legal status of “unlawful” and “enemy combatants.” Pursuing its thesis that counterterrorism as promulgated by the Bush administration needs to be registered as an emergent political rationality, the article draws from the thought of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault for its concluding analysis of the effects of counterterrorist surveillance and other forms of social regulation on political subjectivity and the enactment of democratic freedom.     

Representing Women in Chinese Village Self-Government: A New Perspective on Gender,Representation, and Democracy

ABSTRACT

Recent feminist debate about how to achieve the substantive representation of women in government has been conducted largely in relation to national parliaments in democratic states. This article brings a new perspective by examining grassroots rural government in contemporary China – an authoritarian state, which, however, began implementing village “self-government,” including elections, in 1987. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Yunnan. The authors went into this fieldwork with an understanding that women's substantive representation, democracy, and gender equality are mutually constituted and with an expectation that village self-government might make a much-needed contribution to the achievement of all three. However, we ran into trouble with this analytical framework. First, there were marked variations in villagers’ practices and understandings of “representation.” Second, we found that democracy was not a prerequisite for substantive representation. Third, most villagers we talked with claimed that “men and women are equal” and there was little conception of villagers’ interests diverging by gender. This article explores our analytical “trouble,” with a view to advancing scholarship on constraints to democracy in authoritarian states and suggesting fruitful directions for feminist theorists interested in the relationship between gender, representation and democracy.     

Inequality for the Greater Good: Gendered State Rule in Singapore

Abstract

The Singapore state, in response to demographic trends of later marriage and lower fertility, has put in place numerous institutions aimed at “protecting” the family as a unit. In their effects, many of the policies place disproportionate burdens on women, particularly insofar as the policies reproduce “traditional” gendered divisions of labor within the household at the same time that they encourage women to participate in the formal workforce. We might expect the contradictory demands placed on women and the gender inequalities embedded within the state's policies to lead to resistance and/or expressions of displeasure — in ways that could undermine the state's legitimacy — but the policies seem instead to be integral to and enhancing of the state's capacity for rule. This article shows that gendered family policies reproduce state power through three interconnected mechanisms: they establish regular relationships between state and society; articulate particular identities and interests of Singaporeans as members of families, thereby undercutting gender and ethnic identities; and give content to notions of “tradition” and “modernity” that solidify the state's claim to being the only agent able to balance the twin tensions that are at the core of the nation's survival.     

Inequality,Wealth and Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Acemoglu and associates argue that resistance to democratisation will be stronger where inequality is high. Piketty shows that shifts at the upper end of the distribution may be historically more significant than overall measures of inequality. In Thailand, the high level of income inequality has eased slightly since 2000, but there is a “1% problem” as peak incomes are growing faster than the average. Newly available data show that inequality of wealth is very high. At the top of the wealth pyramid, family holdings of commercial capital are growing. A significant proportion of top entrepreneurs have emerged within the past generation. A second tier of the wealth elite has developed over the past generation from rising property values, financial investments and professional incomes. Although their individual wealth is much less than the corporate elite, their numbers are much greater. The existence of the prospering “1%” and the emergence of the second-tier wealthy may corroborate Acemoglu’s proposition, but there are tensions within the wealth elite which may favour democracy.     

The file on operation “Priboi”: A re-assessment of the mass deportations of 1949

Abstract

Using information from documents found in the Russian State Military Archives, this article discusses the organization and execution of the Soviet mass deportations from the Baltic States in March 1949 — code-named Operation “Priboi” by the USSR MVD. These findings are presented for the first time in English, in the context both of established historiographical interpretations and recent literature on the deportations. The aim is to encourage a scholarly reassessment of Operation “Priboi” as a crime against humanity perpetrated by the Soviet occupation regime, but supported by indigenous collaborators to a far greater degree than previously assumed.     

From employed to self-employed: An analysis of entrepreneurship in rural Latvia

Abstract

Private business is encouraged in transition countries in order to generate economic development in rural areas. This paper explores different forms of rural businesses in a peripheral region in Latvia. It builds primarily on interviews with business leaders and farmers. The analysis focuses particularly on the individuals that run businesses and how they utilise opportunities and respond to constraints. Individual resources such as ownership of land and buildings, skills and access to influential and geographically wide networks have been decisive for identification and exploitation of business opportunities in this rural context. Successful businesses demand that skills and contacts are continuously updated. Those undertaking such business activities that continuously try to adapt to the changing situation may be called “adaptive entrepreneurs”. Two different forms of adaptive entrepreneurs are identified; “flexible entrepreneurs”, those with greater ability to reorganize their businesses, and “restricted entrepreneurs”, those with more limited flexibility, which make them most vulnerable to change.