Abstract: This article details a correction to the article: Diskul, M.L.D., Collins, J. and Brombacher, D., 2021. Drugs and Development in the Urban Setting—Expanding Development-Oriented Interventions Beyond Illicit Drug Crop Cultivation. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2(2), pp.80–90. DOI : http://doi.org/10.31389/jied.73 Published on 2021-11-29 11:07:32
Abstract: Transnational counterfeiting conspiracy cases often link the developing and the developed world in illicit ways. In many of these cases, a forged copy of name-brand merchandise is produced cheaply, and transported and shipped to a destination market where it is sold to consumers at a high mark-up, producing multiple harms. An overlooked element of these counterfeiting schemes is the essential role that cybercrime plays in their operation. Several transnational organized crime and cybercrime prosecutions are examined here to assess the role of counterfeiting in these criminal operations. The three conspiracies involve electronics, pills, and perfume—all illustrating the centrality of cybercrime in their commission. The implications for investigation, policy and practice are noted. Published on 2021-11-23 14:09:43
Abstract: Commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) is receiving necessary attention around the world, but the phenomenon remains underreported in the Western Balkans. Through the first part of this paper the authors set out to provide an overview of the knowledge base of the risks and vulnerabilities of the Western Balkans to CSEC. They underline that there is a clear need for more quality and quantity of data. Indeed, the lack of awareness of key actors in the child protection system makes the region further vulnerable to CSEC. In the second section of the paper, the authors then provide a brief analysis of the Western Balkans’ relevant legal commitments at the international and regional levels, and an overview of how sexual exploitation of children is covered in national law. It concludes that efforts to define and regulate CSEC in compliance with international standards need to be accompanied by a better implementation of such norms, as well as by an efficient allocation of resources aimed at increasing awareness and collaboration among the stakeholders concerned. Published on 2021-11-23 14:05:10
Abstract: Through this paper, the author emphasises the importance of the role that migrant women and men play in the Italian agricultural sector, and the need to better protect them from forms of labour exploitation. Italian products are well known all over the world and represent the excellency of an entrepreneurial fabric made of thousands of family-run small and medium enterprises which from the Alps to Sicily produce unique fruits, vegetables, food, and wines. But a long history of illegal recruitment and labour exploitation, known in Italy as caporalato, tarnish the long supply chain which brings Italian agri-food products to dining tables and market shelves across the globe. In addition, to cope with the forms of exploitation occurring in the Italian countryside, this the paper points out the need to harmonise norms and regulation on labour, migration, and human rights. In doing so, it also argues that both the mens legislatoris and law enforcement authorities modus operandi should progressively move from an approach which is based on a relentless pursuit of the organized crime component for criminalising the acts of labour exploitation and illegal recruitment as defined in the criminal code, to a more comprehensive and holistic approach which puts the rights of migrant agricultural workers as the agenda’s top priority. Published on 2021-11-23 13:59:48
Abstract: This article breaks new conceptual ground by questioning orthodox interpretations of nation state agency in the global drug wars. Specifically, it challenges the David vs. Goliath conception of Colombia as a passive, client state simply abiding to the United States’ hegemonic war on drugs. It provides the first published analysis of Colombia’s leadership during the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs (UNGASS) in 2016. It argues that the UN served as a useful forum for Colombia’s displacement of state building dilemmas, including drug control, and that Bogota utilised the UN as a proxy negotiating mechanism with the US and other international donors. Published on 2021-11-23 13:55:33
Abstract: This paper is about the irregular war in Rio de Janeiro regarding its rules and dynamics, its links with local politics and transnational business, as well as the actors’ subjective meanings, part of the ethnographic data gathered over years. My approach has been to interact with many actors during long periods of time using multiple sources of data to adjoin clues and contradictions provided by the various agents interviewed. I followed the precepts developed by Gluckman and Buroway on the extended case method, adapting it to the violent social contexts in the favelas of Rio emphasizing conflicts and diversity within them. The analysis bears also statistical and historical material. In 1980, I found a new neighborhood organization: drug-dealing gangs engaged in turf wars. In them, a kind of male identity was the crux of the matter to understand the subjective meanings and the ethos not revealed on the surface of everyday experience. Some youngsters, who plunged in violence and crime, interiorized the warrior ethos or violent practices, becoming their own executioners by killing each other with increasing cruelty justified by the warfare. This altered completely not only the local balance of power but the sociability between neighbors in such areas. Published on 2021-11-23 13:08:20
Abstract: This review critically engages with the debate on the importance of corruption for illicit tobacco trade. It proposes to solve the disagreement in the literature by advancing a nuanced analysis of how different types of corruption are linked to various forms of illicit tobacco trade. It conceptualises the role of corruption by breaking it down into necessary and sufficient conditions. The analysis shows that unlike price differential, corruption is mostly part of sufficient condition. It is a necessary condition only in the case of illicit whites whereby tobacco manufacturers are involved in one way or the other. The measurement indices and common definitions of corruption do not usually incorporate this kind of private sector corruption. Published on 2021-11-23 13:05:07
Abstract: This volume is part of the response to the 2016 UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on international drug policy and the emergence of analysis of international drug policy in academic literature. Editors David Bewley-Taylor and Khalid Tinasti, both respected authors in their own right, have collated a rich collection of essays and chapters from a welcomely international list of academic and specialist authors, with significant representation from non-Anglophone and non-Western countries. They have selected authors to provide an analytical critique of international drug policy, evidencing their stance of challenging ‘official’ literature on the topic. The editors describe current policy as being ‘a predominantly supply oriented approach based on prohibition and a reliance on law enforcement, and in some cases military, interventions’.Organised in four parts—‘History of international drug control’, ‘The geospatial dimensions of drug policy’ (chapters cover the Americas, Africa, Muslim nations, Asia, Oceania and Europe), ‘Emerging tensions within the UN drug control system and beyond’, and ‘Future challenges’—the variety of authorial backgrounds provides a correspondingly rich collection of themes, regions, countries and political processes, extending the debate on international drug policy and the workings and failings of the UN Conventions. Themes include the origins of international drug policy, access to essential medicines, human rights, the growth of alternative policy and practice and the implicit disregard of the orthodoxy this represents, the emergence of novel psychoactive substances and responses to them, crypto-markets, metrics and the use of international drug policy by some nations as a disguise or justification for internal repression.The editors posit that contradictions and disagreements amongst the international community and international agencies are pulling the ‘consensus’ in different directions, reform versus prohibition, revealing the lack of reality (and success) in the Conventions’ terminology of a drug-free world and societies free of drug abuse and the damaging and destructive impact of the policies and practices which operate under their umbrella.The chapters are the results of research, many portraying geographies and themes that are themselves the result of research and field-work, which will not be welcomed by some regimes. The book is not, though, a handbook of research methodologies: the closest it comes to being so is Measham’s chapter on novel psychoactive substances (NPS), describing research practices which have been developed to determine the prevalence of NPS and the chemicals involved in them. This does not detract from the overall breadth and richness of the contents. Nor is it the ‘first comprehensive overview … of the drug policy landscape’, as the editors suggest, having been preceded byKlein and Stothard’s 2018 collection, to which both editors contributed chapters. Published on 2021-11-23 12:59:35
Abstract: I present here selected articles that originated from the Simposio de antropología “entre lo legal y lo illegal” in Monterrey, Mexico, November 2019. These articles focus on Latin American borders: the U.S.-Mexico border, the Brazil-Paraguay border, and the Argentina-Bolivia border. These Latin American scholars resist the top-down agenda of seeing threat in everything that has been illegalized, because as they show, many smuggled goods are normalized and present few risks and many benefits to civilians. Yet at the same time, they draw attention to the terrible levels of criminal and state violence that do occur around intensely illegalized commodities. They do not offer a solution, but they do offer insights for progress on this crucial question. Published on 2021-11-23 12:55:54
Abstract: This article aims to explain the smuggling of goods in the Mexico-US border from Wittgenstein’s perspective on the worlds of life and language games. This work advocates for an approach that considers the diversity of circumstances, the hierarchical inequalities, the amalgam between actors and ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ activities, and the ‘arrangements’ happening as part of the way each individual interprets whatever he watches, and what he and those he is interacting with are doing. This work is based on observations and interviews with merchants and customs employees that make ‘arrangements.’ The question to be answered is: what are the meanings and assumptions that make such ‘arrangements’ happen between merchants and customs employees, so that the goods can cross the border illegally' Based on Wittgenstein’s perspective, this paper also tries to analyze the ‘irony’ resulting from the transformation of the ‘arrangement’ once the drug cartel members started participating in it. Published on 2021-11-23 12:51:52
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