From the economy of deficit to the black-market: car theft and trafficking in Bulgaria

Official and victimisation data show that despite falling rates for motor vehicle thefts, much of the EU ‘organized crime’ related thefts have remained almost stable. Nevertheless, the car-theft market in the EU has changed, and so has the role of traditional destinations for stolen vehicles, such as Eastern Europe. The paper examines the demand, supply, and regulation factors that shape the structures of the vehicle theft market in Bulgaria, and smuggling patterns and offender behaviour in source countries, in particular Spain. We argue that such nuanced historical approach that takes into account a wider range of factors in destination countries can help explain the recent transformations in Europe’s vehicle-theft markets.

White-collar,organised and cyber crimes in the media: some contrasts and similarities

This article examines the media reportage of white-collar crimes, organised crimes and cybercrimes, principally in the British but also in the US media. It illustrates the ways in which different newspapers depict crime seriousness and how some defendants adapt to these portrayals. It examines competing explanatory models and suggests that although reportage has an ideological component, ‘news values’ and production pressures as well as ‘action triggers’ such as prosecutions or regulatory interventions are important.

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The Social Dilemma of European Integration

This essay examines the problems that many scholars raise when referring to the EU’s chances of implementing a true, original and effective social model, capable of renewing the Welfare State model developed after the Second World War. The analysis is conducted in the light of the process of ‘constitutionalisation’ in the European Union and of the Lisbon Treaty. Following a constructive approach, the author examines the current debate among European public actors on this issue, with particular emphasis on the ‘advanced enforcement’ of the Nice Bill of Rights evident in the jurisprudence of the European Courts as well as in recently published European Commission documents on ‘flexicurity’.

Wasting innovation: barriers to entry and European regulation on waste electronic equipment

The European Directive on Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment 2002/96/EC distorts incentives in regulated markets. Treatment of ‘historical waste’—i.e. products sold prior to 13 August 2005—is financed by all firms in the market at the time of disposal. This stimulates excessive pre-regulation output by incumbents for two reasons: a costs sharing effect and entry deterrence. Entry deterrence is achieved by raising the common costs of waste disposal. Entry is a main driver of innovation in the affected industries. The feasibility of a first best policy is discussed and an alternative rule superior to the status quo is presented.

Financing the Athenian state: public choice in the age of Demosthenes

The present essay analyses Athenian finances during the fourth century BC, the ‘Age of Demosthenes’, from both the revenue and expenditure points of view. It examines how Athenians practiced the concept of ‘economic democracy’ on matters of public choice, and the sometimes ingenious solutions they adopted for financing public goods such as defense, education and ‘social security’. Ancient Athens, the ‘prototype’ political democracy, was advanced also in matters of public administration, finance and institutions, on which political democracy was based and without their smooth running could not have functioned.

East Meets West in Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Finance: Policy Dialogue and Differentiation on Security, the Timber Trade and ‘Alternative’ Banking

This paper compares and contrasts South East Asian and European Union countries’ perceptions of the priorities for anti money laundering (AML) and anti terrorist finance (ATF) in relation to three industries: security goods and services; the timber trade; and ‘informal’ value transfer and banking services. It might be expected that all countries would equally support each of these aspects of AML/ATF policies, without differentiating between the industries generating the proceeds. As this paper will show, however, historical experiences, contemporary political relations and patterns of trade shape countries’ approaches, resulting in distinctive enthusiasms and reservations. In a nutshell, the EU points most strongly to products and services originating in Asia as posing AML/CTF risks, and locates primary responsibility for monitoring and control as falling within Asia - a projection of risk and responsibility that is reciprocated by Asian countries. Asian countries perceive a need for tighter control of dangerous products exported by the west, for example, small arms and light weapons, and of related money laundering circuits. Asian and European policy makers increasingly articulate concerns over illegal logging and related laundering, however European importers and their governments see responsibilities for this as falling primarily within Asia. Finally, the EU (like the US) perceives high levels of laundering risk in ‘informal’ value transfer/banking services, in which Asian-run businesses have a global competitive advantage. For the future, as the international balance of trade shifts, and as Asia increases its influence in international fora including those concerned with AML/CTF, so the region’s policy preferences may be expected to carry more weight.

Becoming ‘European’ through police reform: a successful strategy in Bosnia and Herzegovina?

Police reform plays a key role in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internationally-supervised statebuilding process. It is one of the four key conditions to move the country closer to its European future. Against this background the article analyses the role that the European Union Police Mission (EUPM) plays in preparing Bosnian police agencies for this challenge. Using as guiding tools some of the key elements of the Mission’s leitmotif—local ownership, European police standards—the article comes to the conclusion that EUPM has introduced much needed reforms but these have been overshadowed, among other things, by the police restructuring process and its unnecessary politicisation of “European police standards/practices” to fit a model of statehood not shared by all local stakeholders.

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Mind The Gap

The governance phenomenon brings law back to its very ‘origin’, namely, law-making (‘Recht-Fertigung’), and reveals that law is not anchored to a specific ‘polis’ or to Hobbesian statehood, but is able to pursue different forms of ‘the common’ as long as its paradox function is fulfilled. Law recognises and develops normative standards for the creation of social structures while also leading a continuous battle against any restrictions to democracy, common wealth and justice connected to these structures. Law here acts ‘politically’ and in affinity to social movements that struggle against any form of social ‘immunisation’. This article analyses the conditions of this affinity and its consequences for the concept of ‘justice’.

Philosophy of Law Against Sovereignty: New Excesses,Old Fragmentations

The only way of entering the world of ‘fragmented law’ (or ‘societal constitutionalism’) is arguably to make normative fragmentation correspond with constituent excess. As Foucault would say, once we are involved in an ‘epistemic crisis’, we must then modify those systems that organise knowledge in conjunction with the very forms that produce it. This contribution considers some privileged forms of critique and reconstruction beyond normative fragmentation and essentially argues in favour of governance dynamics, as well as for ontological devices engaged in the production of subjectivity.

EU Fraud: institutional and legal competence

This paper will focus on frauds committed against the budget of the European Union. It will consider the role of OLAF (the European Fraud Prevention Office) which is the lead agency in the fight against fraud. It will consider its powers and its capacity to co-ordinate the activities of anti-fraud agencies in twenty seven member states and the constraints which prevent it from operating in a more effective manner. The paper will also consider the role of other transnational bodies such as Eurojust and Europol and will seek to highlight the degree of fragmentation which exists with a multiplicity of actors involved in policing fraud, a fragmented legal approach and the difficulties this presents in policing sophisticated transnational frauds. The effect of EU expansion on this situation will also be examined and the EU anti-fraud efforts of the Czech Republic will be considered in some detail. The paper concludes that the legal system and the institutions are not yet in place to enable such frauds to be adequately policed.

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Criminal Exploitation of Online Systems by Organised Crime Groups

This article considers how information and communications technologies (ICT) can be used by organised crime groups to infringe legal and regulatory controls. Three categories of groups are identified: traditional organised criminal groups which make use of ICT to enhance their terrestrial criminal activities; organised cybercriminal groups which operate exclusively online; and organised groups of ideologically and politically motivated individuals who make use of ICT to facilitate their criminal conduct. The activities of each group are then assessed in relation to five areas of risk: the use of online payment systems, online auctions, online gaming, social networking sites and blogs. It is concluded that the distinction between traditional organised crime groups and the other two groups—cybercriminal groups and ideologically/politically motivated cyber groups—is converging, with financially-motivated attacks becoming more targeted. Legislation will need to adapt to deal with new technological developments and threats that organised criminals seek to exploit.

A New Alliance of De-legalisation and Legal Formalism? Reflections on Responses to the Social Deficit of the European Integration Project<Superscript>⋆</Superscript>

This paper will cover a wide range of issues. It will start with a reconstruction of the European Community’s ‘social deficit’, arguing that a credible response to this deficit would be a pre-condition for the democratic legitimacy of the deepened integration project. Such a response can be developed in a re-conceptualisation of European law as a new type of supranational/trans-statal conflict of laws – this is the thesis defended in the second section. This vision is contrasted in the third section, first with the steps towards Social Europe envisaged in the Draft Constitutional Treaty, and then with the messages of the recent judgments of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Viking and Laval. It goes without saying that the theoretical premises of the argument, let alone its many interdisciplinary dimensions and empirical background, can often only be signalled, but not developed systematically.

Poverty and Peacemaking Criminology: Beyond Mainstream Criminology

Mainstream criminology has traditionally focused on poverty as an isolated variable, whose effects are typically explored by inserting a limited measure of this variable in a multivariate analysis. Peacemaking criminology, however, offers an alternative perspective. In this paradigm, poverty is seen as a source of suffering and, to a degree, a “crime” in and of itself. Furthermore, the suffering poverty engenders is an enveloping social experience that exposes its victims to concentrated disadvantage—or, to use Jonathan Kozol’s (1991) term, to a range of “savage inequalities.” Thus, poverty is best understood not as an isolated variable, but as a master status of fundamental social reality that subjects people to lives filled with suffering—suffering that can engender criminal behavior. From a peacemaking perspective, a key avenue for preventing crime is, in the short run, diminishing the suffering poverty causes and, in the long run, embracing social policies that reduce the prevalence of economic suffering in contemporary society.

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The lore of criminal accusation

In crime-obsessed cultures, the rudimentary trajectories of criminalizing processes are often overlooked. Specifically, processes of accusation that arrest everyday life, and enable possible enunciations of a criminal identity, seldom attract sustained attention. In efforts at redress, this paper considers discursive reference points through which contextually credible accusations of ‘crime’ are mounted. Focusing particularly on the ethical dimensions of what might be considered a ‘lore’ (rather than law) of criminal accusation, it examines several ways that exemplary cases reflect paradigms of accusatorial practice, accuser identity formation and accused response. With such assumptive grids in mind, the paper signals the potential value of rescuing accusation from fundamental attachments to (a criminally defined) order and disorder, as well as images of a distinct accuser and accused offender. It then alludes to the prospect of pursuing justice through less exclusive forms of accusation

The European Union in global environmental governance: Leadership in the making?

For well over a decade, the European Union (EU) has proclaimed its leadership role in global environmental governance (GEG). In this article, we examine both the nature of its leadership and the underlying conditions for ‘actorness’ upon which leadership must depend. The EU’s record in the global conferences as well as its influence on the reform of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are also investigated. We argue that the EU has frequently sought to shape international environmental negotiations and promote sustainable development as an organising principle of global governance. Despite its inadequate status at the UN and internal problems, it has had a significant effect on the global agenda. However, due to persistent diplomatic opposition from other coalitions, its real, directly visible influence has been more modest. For genuine directional leadership, which goes beyond the defence of self-interest, the Union will have to make internal policy coherence a greater priority. Moreover, apart from relying solely on its weighty presence in the international system or its potential capabilities, the EU needs to achieve a high level of credibility in order to enhance its powers of persuasion.

A Multilevel Analysis of the Vulnerability,Disorder, and Social Integration Models of Fear of Crime

The current research tests three conceptual models designed to explain citizens’ fear of crime—vulnerability, disorder, and social integration. These models are assessed for differential impact across the cognitive and affective dimensions of fear of crime. The analysis reported here considers the consecutive and simultaneous influence of individual- and city-level factors using multilevel modeling techniques. Recently collected survey data for 2,599 citizens nested within 21 cities across Washington State provide the empirical evidence for the analysis. Results indicate that the disorder model is best able to explain variation in both the cognitive and affective dimensions of citizens’ fear of crime across cities. The vulnerability and social integration models explain significantly less variation. Further, the vulnerability model lacks directional consistency across the observed dimensions of fear. Societal implications of the research findings are discussed.

Who are ‘we’? Don’t make me laugh

This paper explores the implications of uses of the word ‘we’ in post-apartheid South African fiction. ‘We’ in these novels is typically a contested linguistic site – which tells of the loss of inherited communities, and reflects the ethically complex negotiations of a ‘we’ perhaps still to come. Yet if the internal narratives assert a loss of community, each event of the novel’s being-read inaugurates a new ‘community’ of readers. The paper considers the ethical implications of the act of reading a literary text in post-apartheid South Africa. In the course of the argument, I draw links between African philosophies of community, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposition that ‘I’ does not precede ‘we’. Thus I suggest some ways in which philosophies from Africa contribute towards current debates about ‘we’ in contemporary continental philosophy.

White collar crime,consumers and victimization

Consumers have long been recognized as one of the major groups of victims of white collar and corporate crime, although many of the activities which harm them are not widely regarded as ‘crime’. They tend to attract less publicity, and have been subject to less academic research, particularly in comparison with major financial frauds or cases involving mass harms. Moreover, there has been a tendency to view consumers as a relatively undifferentiated group, all of whom are likely to be victimized. This article identifies a wide range of crimes which affect consumers and explores some of the characteristics of victims and offenders, arguing that while all consumers are at risk, the impact of consumer crime, like other forms of crime, reflects wider patterns of structural inequality and falls most severely on the most disadvantaged.

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A comparison of the Russian and Canadian experiences with defining “organized crime”

The dangers stemming from organized crime have been widely acknowledged in the academic literature, government reports, as well as in popular discourse. This article focuses on the legislative efforts to define “organized crime” undertaken in Russia and Canada. Neither country has yet devised a satisfactory legislative definition of the varied phenomenon that is organized crime. Definitions in both jurisdictions are problematic due to their sweeping scope and insufficient delineation of a zone of risk for the accused as well as law enforcement officials. However, striking a proper balance between security concerns and human and civil rights in both countries will be problematic due to constant political pressure to “get tough on crime” as well as due to the amorphous nature of the phenomenon of organized crime.