Conference Schedule

Defund Security: Counterterrorism and Security Capitalism.

The laboratory will be dedicated to the challenges of doing ethnography in the field of security and crime.

3.45pm-4.30pm
Deniz Yonucu (author): "Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul". Cornell University Press, 2022.

Ilana Feldman (discussant)
Kevin Karpiak (discussant)

In Police, Provocation, Politics, Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis of contemporary policing practices, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence, perpetual conflict, and ethnosectarian discord by the state security apparatus. Situating Turkish policing within a global context and combining archival work and oral history narratives with ethnographic research, Yonucu demonstrates how counterinsurgency strategies from the Cold War and decolonial eras continue to inform contemporary urban policing in Istanbul. Shedding light on counterinsurgency's affect-and-emotion-generating divisive techniques and urban dimensions, Yonucu shows how counterinsurgent policing strategies work to intervene in the organization of political dissent in a way that both counters existing alignments among dissident populations and prevents emergent ones. Yonucu suggests that in the places where racialized and dissident populations live, provocations of counterviolence and conflict by state security agents as well as their containment of both cannot be considered disruptions of social order. Instead, they can only be conceptualized as forms of governance and policing designed to manage actual or potential rebellious populations.

Deniz Yonucu received her PhD degree in Social Anthropology from Cornell University and is a lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology at Newcastle University. Her first book Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022) presents a counterintuitive analysis of policing, focusing particular attention on the incitement of counterviolence and perpetual conflict by the state security apparatus. Deniz Yonucu is Directions Section co-editor of Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) and co-founder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Current Anthropology, IJURR, Social and Legal Studies, the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies and Critical Times, among others.


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4.45pm-5.30pm
Clara Rigoni (author): "Honour-Based Violence and Forced Marriages: Community and Restorative Practices in Europe", Routledge, 2022.

In the last 20 years, the related phenomena of honour-based violence and forced marriages have received increasing attention at the International and European level. Punitive responses towards this type of violence have been adopted, including ad hoc criminalisation and legislation containing direct references to the concepts of honour, culture and tradition. However, criminal law-based responses present several shortcomings and have often disregarded the specific needs that victims of such crimes might encounter. This book examines the possibility of using alternative programs to address cases of honour-based violence and forced marriages. After reviewing previous existing literature, it presents new empirical data. Introducing a case-study from the United Kingdom, the book recalls the debate on Sharia Councils and the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal but examines instead other community-based, secular, programs. By comparison, a study from Norway on the work of the National Mediation Agency and the so-called Cross-Cultural Transformative Mediation model is investigated as part of a larger multi-agency approach. Ultimately, in an attempt to reconcile pluralism and the rule of law, the book proposes effective ways to tackle honour crimes based on cooperation and individualization of the proceedings, and capable of improving women’s access to justice and reducing secondary victimization.

Clara Rigoni is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law. She has been a Lecturer at the University of Freiburg and at the University of Trento. She holds a Master in Law from the University of Bologna, a Master in Human Rights and Democratization from the European Inter-University Center and a Ph.D from the University of Freiburg.


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5.30pm-6.15pm
Lucia Michelutti (author): "Mafia Raj. The rule of bosses in South Asia", Stanford University Press, 2019.

"Mafia" has become an indigenous South Asian term. Like Italian mobsters, the South Asian "gangster politicians" are known for inflicting brutal violence while simultaneously upholding vigilante justice—inspiring fear and fantasy. But the term also refers to the diffuse spheres of crime, business, and politics operating within a shadow world that is popularly referred to as the rule of the mafia, or "Mafia Raj." Through intimate stories of the lives of powerful and aspiring bosses in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, this book illustrates their personal struggles for sovereignty as they climb the ladder of success. Ethnographically tracing the particularities of the South Asian case, the authors theorize what they call "the art of bossing," providing nuanced ideas about crime, corruption, and the lure of the strongman across the world.

Lucia Michelutti is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. Her major research interest is the study of popular politics,  caste and race, religion, crime and violence across South Asia (North India) and Latin America (Venezuela). She is currently the PI of an ERC Advance Grant Project entitled ‘Anthropologies of Extortion’.

Chair: Juulia Kela (PhD candidate, Helsinki university), Justyna Struzik (Assistant Professor, Jagiellonian University, Kraków), Jérémy Geeraert (Post-doc Researcher, University Paris-Saclay).

In countries such as the US, France, and South Africa, scholars have documented a growing trend towards criminalisation - i.e. an expanding call for and application of criminal laws and crime control measures in various areas of social life. Intrinsically intertwined with the production of social imaginaries around crime and criminality, this governance strategy rests on the construction of groups and practices as threats to, and victims or protectors of, existing moral and social orders. Identified through terms including "criminals", "victims", "saviors", "crime-fighters", "concerned bystanders" or "threats", these figures are embedded in moral economies that extend beyond (or against) legal and official discourses and perform a specific perception of the social. Nonetheless, contemporary, observable figurations of crime are immersed in genealogical trajectories, historically complex governing processes that form the very conditions of their possibilities. Building on our ongoing work in the fields of sea rescue, infectious diseases, drug use, hate speech, etc. as part of the research project "CrimScapes: Navigating citizenship through European landscapes of criminalisation", this panel offers an in-depth discussion on contemporary figures of crime through the lens of their genealogies. In particular, we ask:

*How do different historical trajectories lead to the emergence of an understanding of criminalisation, and its attendant figures, as a way of governing society? How does the genealogical approach contribute to the discussion of figurations of crime and criminals? *How do legal and crime-control policies, and political debates, imaginaries and practices, frame criminalized spaces and re-shape particular figures of crime and criminality?

*Which moral economies, socio-political paradigms and imaginations of threat, protector and crime coalesce in the production of figures of crime so as to justify or contest criminalisation as a legitimate or necessitated mode of governance?

We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions from researchers representing various disciplines and research fields interested in the genealogical formation of what is marked and governed as crime and criminal, and the affiliated production of condensed figures of threat or protector.


SPEAKERS:

Carolina Di Prospero (Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) Universidad Nacional de San Martín):

State criminalization: penitentiary polices in Argentina inspired by Anglo-Saxon theories of Risk/Need/Responsiveness

Keywords: State; criminalization; penitentiary polices; RNR; Argentina

This work is part of a larger project that aims to describe and ethnographically analyze penitentiary management experiences in Argentina developed in the last 10 years. The time cut chosen refers to the arrival in the entire South American region a series of novelties in penitentiary policy based on the theories of Risk/Need/Responsivity and the desistance of crime (Andrew & Bonta, 2006). This paradigm in criminal matters have been theoretically elaborated in the eighties in Anglo-Saxon countries, specially in Canada and England. This perspective, with criteria of applied criminology and supported by disciplines such as statistics, mathematics and economics, have stimulated the development of new actuarial technologies to identify "risk factors" of people who have committed crimes, associated with the probability of engaging in criminal behavior again. From there, the "criminogenic needs" that must be addressed in each case, and the identification of the "protective factors" that should be strengthened to avoid recidivism are defined.
The last years in Argentine federal prison system, strategy based in RNR model have replaced the focus of prison treatment and its scale of intervention in different aspects: the constant need to produce information on and about the detainees in order to build a database to develop risk indices (of recidivism, conflict, flight, suicide); looking at the problem of recidivism exclusively in the figure of the offender (the broader context became an accessory); a certain shift in the role of the State in the task of inclusion and access to rights (related to the problem of crime and (in)security, which now guides all its interventions); the replacement of the criteria and empathy of the penitentiary professional by administrative-bureaucratic procedures, under the pretext of objectivity. The underlying idea that supports RNR theory is that the concrete functioning of the prison system must respond more to the risk reduction during the period of confinement than to the subjective transformation of the inmate, in this way criminal punitivism polices are sustained both, theoretically and empirically.
This paper will address the implementation of an Anglo-Saxon model in the Argentine penitentiary governance strategy since 2014 to 2020.

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Alexandra Carina Grolimund (University of Essex):

Criminalising consensual sex: SM, the law & a hidden history of activism

Keywords: BDSM; sadomasochism: bodily autonomy; human rights; sex positivity; criminal law

SM (Sadism/Masochism) sex is not understood in the English legal context as good reason for bodily harm. Though practitioners consent to the infliction of said harm in the course of SM sex, legal lacunas render bodily harm for the purposes of sexual pleasure illegal, effectively invalidating consent. This poses a challenge to bodily and sexual autonomy. The predicament stems from the fallout of ‘Operation Spanner’, the R v Brown House of Lords case, its ascension to the European Court of Human Rights and consequential limitations on sexual expression; re-examination of this case study and subsequent legal trajectory enables the charting of domestic and international criminalisation of BDSM (Bondage, Discipline/Domination, Sadism/Submission, Masochism). Examining the case might explain why consensual sex is still illegal nearly 30 years on and allows for a reimagination of the 'sadomasochist' based on lived experiences and activism. Why might pain be pleasurable and why might it necessitate decriminalization? Might the resurrection of Brown’s framework as statute in the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 reignite the legacy of political and legal discussions in this area? This research offers an opportunity to understand the perceptions and motivations of practitioners in their fight to reconstruct sexual liberty in the legal imagination.

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Justin Helepololei (Colgate University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst):

Against care: The progressive jail and its challenge to abolition

Keywords: Care, Abolition, Decarceration, Addiction, Treatment, Rehabilitation

Over the past decade, growing critiques of mass incarceration and calls to address racial injustice in policing have fueled criminal justice reform efforts across the United States. In progressive contexts, local jails are re-configuring themselves within this shifting moral economy, increasingly emphasizing treatment, rehabilitation, and care - though not fully relinquishing calls for public safety and toughness on crime. Based on activist ethnographic research in New England, I explore how sheriffs are resisting grassroots efforts towards decarceration and prison abolition, using narratives that produce incarcerated people as “threats-to-themselves,” as well as to the broader community. This orientation towards criminalisation-as-care is expanding to include a larger number of people who have been charged with no crime but are incarcerated within jails under “involuntary civil commitments,” largely in response to addiction and mental and behavioral health issues. I consider how activists have responded to this blurring between criminalisation and care, the hybrid object of criminal-as-patient and patient-as-criminal that the progressive jail produces, and the position of being against care that it imposes upon abolitionists.

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Agata Dziuban (Instutute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University):

Threats, victims and abject subjects: Policed abandonment of sex workers in contemporary Poland

Keywords: sex work, criminalisation, threat, victim, policed abandonment, Poland

In May 2021, an interview with sex workers was published the mainstream Polish newspaper. Three sex workers openly talked about their labour and non-coerced paths into sex industry and stated their demands: “I would like to be able to pay taxes and contributions for my social benefits” said one. “I wish that sex workers in Poland did not have to live in constant fear” claimed the other. The third called for the decriminalization of sex work and end to stigma – highly disabling social constructions of the “prostitute” affecting their community. On the forum under the article, one of the readers wrote “I have the impression that all or some of the heroines of the article are made up,” thereby indicating that sex workers forming their demands and critically reflecting on social, legal and cultural context in which they are deemed to exist are inconceivable and their very existence needs to be contested, their fabricated character – laid bare. I argue that this comment manifests the perplexing subject position occupied by sex workers in contemporary Poland: unimaginable as agential claimants, political subjects and rights holders. This presentation will sketch the genealogies of social, legal and political figurations of sex workers in Poland that come to contribute to their non-imaginability as subjects of rights with a political voice. It will focus, specifically, on the emergence of two dominant discursive and legal constructions of a sex worker as a threat and as a the victimised other in need of care. Finally, I will show how those two – seemingly adversative – figures conjoin to incapacitate sex workers by means of protective criminalisation and abandonment, which I conceptually grasp as a form of governance via “policed abandonment”.

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Jérémy Geeraert (Centre national de la recherche scientifique):

Criminal Figures in the landscape of solidarity towards migrant

Keywords: criminalisation; figuration; migration; sea rescue; criminal hero

One recent development in the ever-expanding crackdown on migration and the implementation of a hostile environment for migrants with precarious legal status in the EU has been the criminalization of migrant solidarity (Fekete, 2018). By means of various legal tools, EU governments have been trying to hinder solidarity actions from the civil society toward migrants. Additionally, a narrative depicting civilians and groups helping migrants as criminals has been developed by governmental and supranational organizations and strengthened by far-right groups. In reaction, a counter-narrative has been strengthened and spread by pro-migrant groups and media, which presents concerned criminalized activists as modern criminal heroes and their action as of civilian disobedience (Cusamano&Villa, 2020).

Based on a critical discourse analysis of academic texts, press articles and reports from governmental and non governmental organizations, this article examines two criminal figures coming from the field of civilian search and rescue: the ‘smuggler’ and its counterpart the ‘criminal hero’.
By analyzing the genealogy of these two antagonistic figures and their narratives, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the moral order underpinning the criminalized landscape of solidarity towards migrants. On the one hand, the figure of the ‘smuggler’ is part of a narrative depicting migration as a threat to political, social and economic stability in the EU. Our argument is that, in this sense, the narrative is part of a moral order, which aims to promote a governance based on fear and threat, and which has been developed in recent years. On the other hand, the figure of the modern criminal hero tends to develop a counter-narrative to this moral order based on the idea of solidarity and the defense of basic human rights.

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Todd Sekuler (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute for European Ethnology):

Culture Warlords and digitally-mediated vigilantism. A genealogy of citizen crime-fighters who identify online haters

Keywords: hate, figuration, internet, extremism, vigilantism

In Culture Warlords, the New York-based journalist Talia Lavin presents the fruits of her detective work as part of a year-long investigation into the logics and identities of persons engaged in the trans-nationally and trans-temporally operating worlds of online hate. In a game of seduction under the alias AryanQueen, Lavin narrates, in one chapter, the cat and mouse tactics that culminated in her unearthing of the identity of a 21-year-old Ukrainian operating under the moniker Der Stürmer, a moderator of one of the largest Ukrainian-language right-wing extremist channels. Citing the documented propensity of law enforcement across the globe to be sympathetic to white-nationalist groups, Lavin concludes by asking, “Can we rely on something else entirely—each other?” This article mobilises secondary literature to trace the contours of the figure that Lavin herself comes to shape and embody—one that fights crime online by unmasking the identity of otherwise anonymous, criminal haters. A first section extracts the visibility/invisibility dichotomy and speech-based specifity of this figure by comparing it with other, comparable figures. A second section traces the figure historically, investigating the emergence and naturalisation of a confluence of technological, structural, legal and moral foundations upon which it depends.

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Klara Nagel (speaker) and Friederike Faust (co-author) (Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin):

The Figure of the Female Offender as Victim and Gendered Dimensions of Punishment in Germany

Keywords: women’s prisons, victimization, gender, punishment, figuration

In the last decades of the 20th century scholars have identified a global punitive turn which initiated (among other effects) the securitization of the penal system. In this paper, we engage with the gendered dimensions of punishment and argue that certain female figurations of prisoners have the potential to challenge the politics of securitization and punitivity.
In the course of the 1980s and 90s, feminist criminologists and penal practitioners in (West) Germany called for prison reforms in order to organize the women`s prisons according to women-specific needs and in favor of rehabilitation. By stressing female inmates’ vulnerability and victimization, they argued against the construction of female criminals as (primarily) threats and thus questioned securitization. Gradually, some of the suggestions and demands were put into practice and reorganized confinement of female offenders. Focusing on the women´s prison reform in (West) Berlin, in the paper, we retrace the initiated reforms historically and delineate the persuasiveness of the emerging gendered figure of the “offender-as-victim” (Snider 2003). This enables us to show how this figure significantly affected policy making and penal practice and challenged the global punitive trend. The argument is based on a review of criminological and grey literature as well as interviews with prison reformers.

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Petr Kupka and Václav Walach (University of West Bohemia):

Nineties and Halfworld: Contemporary History of Czechia as a Crime Story

Keywords: collective memory; organized crime; narrative analysis; crime fiction; crime documentary; postsocialism

What is the relationship between crime, collective memory, and political legitimacy? This paper argues that the issue of crime can be used to make sense of complicated historical times such as post-socialism and thereby reinforce the moral legitimacy of the current political order. Based on a narrative-criminological approach, we analyze two TV shows that produced by Czech Television 2022, which provoked significant public debate. Devadesátky (Nineties) is a crime fiction based on real events. Polosvět (Half World) is a documentary that put these events in a broader context, relying on the memory of police officials and investigative journalists. Dealing with the rise of organized crime in Czechia in the 1990s, the shows represent the first post-revolutionary decade as a story of the battle of (good) police officers and journalists with (evil) prominent figures of crime. We read this battle as a re-staged conflict on the legitimacy of the post-socialist regime where structural changes have produced social discontent. In the context of the right-wing populist challenge building on this discontent, Devadesátky and Polosvět function to legitimize the current regime by depolitization (criminalization) of the post-revolutionary developments and re-drawing symbolic boundaries between apolitical law enforcers and criminals and corrupted politicians.

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Kerstin Bree Carlson (Roskilde University):

Danish Legal Constructions of Foreign Fighters: Ukraine vs. Syria

Keywords: foreign fighers; terrorism; criminal law; human rights

On Sunday 27 February, the Danish Prime Minister announced that Denmark will allow its nationals to take up arms in support of Ukraine. This is the opposite of Denmark’s position regarding foreign fighters in Syria. Under Danish terror laws passed in 2002 and 2006, Danes who attempted to travel to Syria can be charged with terror. The crime carries up to four years in prison and the possibility of citizenship revocation. Since 2014, Denmark has been increasingly applying the citizenship revocation option whenever possible, i.e. in cases where defendants enjoy or could enjoy dual citizenship in a country other than Denmark.
On March 3, 2022, Denmark’s citizenship revocation approach received support from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) when the court unanimously rejected the case of Adam Johansen. Johansen’s case is interesting and provocative, because the court’s rational for citizenship revocation turned on Johansen’s Muslim faith, which the court found tied him more strongly to his father’s country of Tunisia than to Denmark, where he was born, raised, and has a wife and child.
Denmark’s stance on foreign fighters in Ukraine invites an analysis of how law should treat foreign fighters, including how and when foreign fighters are terrorists versus private actors. The fact that the ECtHR unanimously allowed Denmark’s citizenship rational to stand invites further consideration of how citizens’ rights may or may not eventually be protected by the Strasbourg court. The paper will take these questions up to consider what is at stake in criminalizing, or not criminalizing, participation in violence movements outside the state.

Chair: Tessa Diphoorn (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University), Zoha Waseem (Assistant Professor of Criminology, University of Warwick), Deniz Yonucu (Lecturer, Newcastle University).

How do social movements and civil society mobilisation impact policing and police reform? Conversely, what do state responses to civil society mobilisation indicate about the social and political legacies of policing? This panel brings together international perspectives on the interplay between mobilisation and policing. In the aftermath of the recent protests around the world (e.g., Black Lives Matter and EndSARS), we are seeing renewed debates on the policing of civil society organisations, vigilantism, and dissent. On the one hand, we are learning more about the nuanced and elusive techniques of surveillance, suppression, and criminalisation of civil society mobilisation through various forms of ‘lawfare’, not necessarily limited to the state police (as seen in Hong Kong, Turkey, and South Asia). On the other hand, we have seen the prominent role that civil society activism and grassroots mobilisation has played in demanding police reform and public accountability (as in Nigeria, Colombia, and other parts of Latin America). Therefore, this panel welcomes critical and international perspectives on the relationship between mobilisation, securitisation, and policing, in terms of (i) state-driven policing and control of activism and dissent, (ii) social resistance to policing practices and strategies, and (iii) public participation in transformative policing calls. This panel invites ethnographic perspectives on this policing-mobilization dynamic not just through anthropological lenses, but also with outlooks from sociology, criminology, politics, and law, to generate a multidisciplinary critical conversation on policing, security, and society.

SPEAKERS:

Dr Roxana Pessoa Cavalcanti (TBC) (University of Brighton):

Understanding the effects of authoritarian governance on activism in Brazil

Keywords: Activism; authoritarianism; mobilisation; Brazil; insecurity; violence.

There is overwhelming evidence that over the last two decades there has been a surge of violence against activists, environmental and human rights defenders (Asmann 2018; Rossi 2021; Human Rights Watch 2021). Activists from marginalised groups are particularly exposed to the violence of dispossession, experiencing harm, threats, stigmatisation and death in struggles over the environment, land and resources (Le Billon and Menton 2021; Middeldorp and Le Billon 2019). Recent reports by Global Witness (2021) reveal that this phenomenon is particularly noticeable in Latin America, where an increasingly alarming number of activists are being threatened and murdered. This paper shares key findings from a thematic analysis of data gathered through 25 online interviews conducted with social justice activists across Brazil between January and May 2021. It examines three key findings: activists’ perceptions of deteriorating or closing dialogue between the State and social movements; the intensification of experiences of insecurity and the effects of the precarisation of living conditions on mobilisation. The paper sheds light on how contemporary forms of the persecution of dissent are permeated by the legacies of colonialism and the expansion of a capitalist, patriarchal and racialised social order.

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Ingo Rohrer (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich):

The Special Prosecutor's Office ATAJO as ally in the mobilisation against policing and criminalisation in Argentina

Keywords: access to justice; street-level bureaucracy; civil society; institutional violence; policing;

Based on ethnographic research in Argentina in this paper I will discuss the Special Prosecutor's Office ATAJO, which stands at the intersection of civil mobilisation and state approaches to criminal policy. Taking its constitutional mandate to represent the interests of the population seriously ATAJO pursues an approach that is critical of current security policies and forms of policing. Instead of putting an emphasis on prosecution, the unit provides access to justice and legal orientation in areas where the state is mostly absent and acts predominantly repressive. ATAJO also offers support in cases of institutional violence and overall assumes - in a rather informal way - the tasks of monitoring and controlling the actions of the police in specific neighbourhoods. The state unit thus shows significant similarities to civil society organisations and their impetus to resist policing practices and to counter the criminalization of the marginalized population. ATAJO therefore is not only an important ally for social movements but also a highly contested stakeholder. Drawing on this specific example I will bring up for discussion the intersections and points of contact between state agencies and civil society.

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Anna Di Ronco and Nigel South (University of Essex):

Contestation and resistance concerning eco-justice and health justice in Italy and Colombia: Two case studies

Keywords: resistance; eco-justice; health justice; Italy; Colombia; Indigenous Peoples

This paper presents two cases of protest and resistance that highlight the roles played by different histories and different strategies in shaping the responses of communities fighting for eco-justice and health justice during the period of the Covid 19 pandemic.
It aims to illustrate how activists in Italy responded to changes in the policing of eco-justice during the pandemic and how Indigenous communities in Colombia fighting for health justice were guided in their response to Covid by a history of colonialism and betrayal.
The Italian case study draws on a 10-month ethnography in the city of Trento (Italy), formal and informal interviews and focus groups with activists of two selected eco-justice movements, and informal conversations with police officers in charge of public order in the city.
The Colombian case draws on a project which has been mapping cultural representations of nature and threats to four Colombian Indigenous Peoples and their cosmologies and eco-systems.

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Tessa Diphoorn and Naomi van Stapele (Utrecht University):

Who’s Saba Saba?: Claiming Ownership and Civic Space in Reforming the Kenyan Police

Keywords: reform, civil society mobilisation

During the past decades, the Kenyan police has been subjected to a broad police reform project. This larger project has included a wide range of actors, such as bilateral donors, various Kenyan state institutions, international consultants, and civil society organizations. This paper focuses on the role that civic actors, such as human rights organizations, community based organizations, and human rights defenders, have played in the police reform project and specifically zooms in on the relationships between different these civic actors. We do so by exploring a particular event, Saba Saba, that was organized on July 7, 2020. This event intended to put the urgent issue of extrajudicial killings on the agenda. Each of us participated in this event with a different organization and in a different setting. By exploring this event, and drawing from ethnographic material collected by both authors, we aim to show the disconnect within civil society in Kenya and the various competitive and disconnected relationships within this sphere that largely pertain to issues of ownership. These disconnected relations, we argue, essentially do not contribute to police reform policies, but co-produce a space that allows impunity on behalf of police officers to persist.

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Zoha Waseem (University of Warwick):

The Criminalization of Sedition and Dissent in Postcolonial Pakistan

Keywords: postcolonial, policing, Pakistan, sedition, dissent

Sedition laws were introduced to South Asia in 1870, where their codification was central to imperial control, allowing the criminalisation of political dissent and nationalism in the former British colonies. More than 150 years later, the laws continue to be applied, increasingly so, in the Indian subcontinent, to deter government critics. In Pakistan, the application of sedition has intensified in reaction to civil society protests and social movements challenging state violence and injustices against marginalised and minority communities. Although sedition has been approached in critical historical, legal, and political scholarship on South Asia, there is little understand on how its threat and application shapes the experiences of civilians impacted by associated procedures and practices. In this chapter, we critically explore the enduring application of the law of sedition as one of the ways in which states in the global South suppress critical thinking, debate, and political opposition. We show that through a purposeful continuation of the colonial criminal justice system and legal frameworks, the postcolonial state is able to pacify resistance to its authority. In exploring this, we further existing understandings of how criminalisation through colonial mechanisms and machineries serves as a weapon in postcolonial states, where regimes have remained inherently insecure. We draw on the experiences of Pakistani citizens accused of sedition, as well as informal interviews with elite participants, case law, archival research, and open sources.

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Deniz Yonucu (Newcastle University, UK):

Aretxaga Revisited: Dissent, the Stalker State and its Psychic Power

Keywords: surveillance, policing, Turkey

Addressing the ever-increasing deployment of undercover police surveillance and informant activities against dissidents and racialised populations in Turkey and elsewhere, this paper explores why in an era of unprecedented development in digital surveillance technologies, such undercover activities are still employed -- not only in Turkey but also in various parts of the world, including Europe. It questions what this surveillance tells us about the state security apparatus and its psychic effects.

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Reynaldo Ortíz-Minaya (Howard University, US):

Policing and Civil Society in the Post-Colonial State: Jamaica Reconsidered, 1962-2022

Keywords: Jamaica, citizen security, postcolonial, policing, police reform

As societies across the world-economy are experiencing rampant levels of social unrest as it pertains to criminal justice reform and policing, the role and impact of civil society organizations is ever more being challenged and placed under assault by state orchestrated forces as well as neoliberal economic policies seeking to minimize, if not destroy, structural police reform at its core. In such regard, the ever-mounting tension between citizen security and the deepening acts of state-sanctioned violence by the police continues to burden grassroots organizations seeking to ameliorate the historical atrocities by policing institutions, in its most broad definition. This analysis seeks to examine and problematize the ways in which Jamaican civil society organizations and grassroots activism have affected policing and corresponding narratives about police reform and state accountability on the Island. By such means, the study seeks to unveil the nexus between civil society, the private sector, and polity in the Jamaican context in ways that address the dichotomy between policing and mobilization. Furthermore, the investigation contextualizes the challenges in Jamaica within a much broader global asymmetrical pattern of growing levels of state repression against resistance from below in ways that can help build bridges of collaboration across geographical boundaries to ensure citizen security.

Chair: Louis Vuilleumier (PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland), Loïc Pignolo (PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Geneva).

Criminalised markets are a global economic phenomenon. While some individuals in precarious conditions manage to make a living by selling illegalised goods or services, those economic activities also raise moral controversies and lead to considerable policing efforts. However, law enforcement does not merely represent a top-down implementation of policies. The gap between political decisions and their concretisation can be explained by the internal tensions and conflictual ambiguity of policies, the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats, but also the capacity of individuals to bypass detection and control. Navigating in an asymmetrical power regime, people wishing to make a living in criminalised economic activities develop a range of strategies to avoid technologies and practices of control. Offenders, moreover, are not isolated but embedded in urban communities which have different attitudes towards illegalized markets, ranging from tolerance and support to indignation and contestation. Therefore, criminality in illegalized markets is better understood as a negotiated process between multiple actors, including offenders, state representatives, and urban communities. This panel seeks to take a closer look at those negotiation practices. We are looking for ethnographic or theoretical contributions that focus on negotiation practices, including but not limited to: embodied, relational and spatio-temporal strategies to cope with socio-legal constrains, relations and coexistence between offenders and urban communities, technologies and practices policing illegalised markets, or moral struggles surrounding those economies. Focusing our attention on concrete practices of negotiation will enable us to explore the nexus between criminalisation and autonomy, security and lived experiences of offenders, illegality and morality. This panel welcomes contributions on a wide range of practices in or related to criminalised markets, in different geographical locations and social contexts. We are also interested in contributions that focus on methodological or ethical issues related to these topics.

SPEAKERS:

Bayle Gauthier (University of Paris Nanterre):

“Soft arrests” underneath the Eiffel Tower: the informal commitments of illegal street vendors and the parisian police

Keywords: Illegal street vendors, Police, Brutality, Urban ethnography, Discretionary power, Informal commitments

Like prostitutes or drug addicts, illegal street vendors are a type of offenders that the police officers are likely to meet on a regular basis in big cities. Although they may raise the ire of the neighborhood and the local store owners, in most places, the way they make a living do not constitute the most threatening law violation. For this reason, but also because they are sometimes too numerous to be arrested, the police may come to think it is useless and/or naïve (to try) to enforce strictly the law. This presentation focuses on the informal rules the Parisian police uses to regulate the number and practices of the illegal street vendors in the very touristic surroundings of the Eiffel Tower. As we will see, the police officers I have interviewed are willing to tolerate the vendors if they sell in certain places and not in a way that visitors might consider inappropriate. Moreover, the data I obtained by collecting the vendors’ viewpoint indicate what they can expect from this dialogue, which can be to be less often arrested but more importantly, to avoid police brutality when they are. Indeed, police and vendors share a common opinion. In the Eiffel Tower’s microcosm, brutality is the attribute of the novice. Thus, the police sees the oldest vendors as interlocutors to be privileged because they would be “wise” and because the youngest would acknowledge their authority. On the other side, vendors take advantage of the same communication channel to force seasoned police officers to temper new recruits.

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André de Pieri Pimentel (first author) (University of Campinas), and Janaina Maldonado (co-author) (German Institute of Global and Area Studies):

Political and economic disputes on the “fight against crime”: the management of car theft in São Paulo, Brazil

Keywords: illegal markets; regulation of crime; ethnography; violence; inequality; São Paulo.

In the year 2021, more than 47000 vehicles were stolen in São Paulo. In the largest metropolis among the Americas, state agents describe vehicle theft as a "public problem". An issue to be addressed by security enforcement and the production of regulatory instruments. However, not only the state produces such. The regulation of crime and illegal markets in contemporary cities is also an important source of accumulation for the private capital. Therefore, we propose an analysis on the disputes between state and private agents on crime management. This analysis is conducted through ethnographic research, since 2015, on the sale of stolen cars recovered by the insurance market through car auctions, and on the activity of car disassembly in São Paulo. These markets are attached to the car theft economic chain. Their management, despite the presence of state regulations, is conducted by the protagonism of private agents, such as insurance companies and auctioneers. Through the mobilization of legal and technological devices, these agents occupy a strategic position, established and protected by laws and state regulatory instruments, which allow them to extract large profits and explore the “grey areas” sited in the boundaries between legal and illegal, formal and informal.

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Louis Vuilleumier (University of Fribourg):

Negotiating deviant entrepreneurship

Keywords: Negotiation; Resistrance; Drug work; Border regimes

European border regimes sort desired and undesired migrants through sets of precarious administrative statuses that translate into limited access to resources, most notably the formal labor market. However, facing enduring unemployment situations, illegalized migrants show themselves creative. Ignoring their territorial assignation, some start an entrepreneurial journey across Europe and thus find ways to navigate and bypass multi-scalar bordering processes. In this paper, I propose to explore the everyday forms of resistance of migrants active in low-level street drugs dealing: a form of negatively labelled entrepreneurship. Zooming on the economic but also networking strategies of illegalized migrants, I investigate the daily practices of an impoverished and dispersed population as silent but nevertheless disruptive political acts. Drawing on a multi-sited fieldwork in Europe, I use biographical interviews to explore the trajectories of Sub-Saharan male migrants and how they negotiate spaces of asymmetrical power relationships. Instead of openly challenging those nested bordering processes, I demonstrate that illegalized migrants’ practices of appropriation oscillate between daily forms of discreet resistance and deliberate conciliation. Neither victimizing nor romanticizing deviant entrepreneurship, this paper offers an ethnographic analysis on the capacities of an impoverished population to appropriate European border regimes by bypassing the rules which are supposed to govern them.

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Elena Butti (Graduate Institute, IHEID):

‘Unruly’ and ‘immoral’? Moral and normative struggles of crime-involved youth in contemporary Colombia

Keywords: Youth, crime, drugs, morality, norms, Colombia

Crime-involved youth are the object of widespread moral panic. They are often seen as the emblem of danger and disorder – an ‘unruly’ and ‘immoral’ constituency that should be contained through stricter education and harsher punishment. But to what extent is this representation of young criminals accurate? Based on ethnographic research with crime-involved adolescents in and around the Medellín, Colombia (2015-2019), this paper questions an understanding of the criminal experience as devoid of law and morality. By analyzing the normative and moral narratives that these young people employ to navigate the criminal world, I illustrate how these young lives are, in fact, highly regulated by multiple sets of rules, norms, and moralities. These range from moralistic education within the home, to repressive school rules, to the constellation of norms enforced by armed actors, vigilantes, and police in the street.
This complex normative and moral landscape produces in crime-involved youth profound feelings of ambivalence and self-blame. On the one hand, they try and justify their criminal involvement as a way of making a living and becoming someone. On the other hand, they deeply question the course their life is taking, and often dream about a different, ‘normal and good’ life away from crime.
These findings bear clear policy implications. More norms, more punishment, and more values are not what these young people are lacking. Rather, interventions should focus on de-legitimizing the use of violence as a form of punishment, as well as tapping into these young people’s spontaneous self-questioning to steer them towards a different life-course.

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Loïc Pignolo (University of Geneva):

Keywords: Morality; Drug dealing; legitimization; ambivalence; cannabis

Moral negotiations and legitimization strategies in a morally ambivalent market: the case of the drug dealing of cannabis in Geneva.

Based on an ethnographic research of the drug dealing of cannabis in a neighbourhood in the city centre of Geneva, this presentation aims to investigate the role of morality in illegalized markets. Drawing on observations and conversations with drug dealers, interviews with consumers and analysis of documents (including official reports and press articles), I show that participation to this market is experienced by drug dealers and consumers as a morally ambivalent practice. First, I analyse their moral views on this market as well as their legitimization strategies to justify their practices. Second, I argue that this moral experience cannot be understood without taking into account the policing of drug dealing, the moral contestation within the community, and the broader moral economy of cannabis market in Geneva. While the drug dealers are publicly constructed as “unwanted” features of the public spaces, consumers often feel shame in resorting to an open market lacking social legitimacy. Overall, my presentation highlights the moral negotiations economic actors engage in when justifying participation to a morally ambivalent illegalized market.

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Guillaume Dumont (Emlyon business school), and Rafael Clua Garcia (University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia):

“Narcopisos”: Novel forms of illegal organizing as a response to health policies, drug law enforcement, and local community pressure.

Keywords: Drugs; illegal occupation; drug enforcement law; illegal organizing

Since 2016, the Barcelonese inner-city neighborhood “El Raval” has been home to the dramatic growth of a novel form of illegal organizing named “Narcopiso”. Sharing similarities with the crack house phenomenon, the term refers to the illegitimate occupation of private properties by criminal organizations to sale heroin, cocaine, crack, and more recently methamphetamine to People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) often injecting or smocking the substance on-site. Building on the preliminary results of an on-going ethnographic project, this paper describes and analyzes the emergence and current forms undertaken by this novel form of illegal organizing. Starting in June 2021, we have been conducting participant observations and semi-structured interviews with PWUD, police forces, harm reduction professionals, residents, and drug activists and dealers. Drawing upon our analysis of this data, we argue that narcopisos has emerged as a dynamic and open-ended organizational response to harm reduction policies, drug law enforcement, pressure from local communities, and an on-going process of neighborhood gentrification.

Chair: Anna Sergi (Professor of Criminology, University of Essex).

Borders are intended as geographical and political boundaries, with physical barriers and/or gated entry/exit points. Borderlands are areas, in proximity of borders, where the affirmation of identity and culture requires empowerment of border stakeholders, recognition of plural approaches, effective scaling of the border relationship, humanised security and acknowledgement of diversity. Complex criminality, such as organised crime, mafia, corruption, illicit trafficking and/or drug trade, is also affected by borders. Borderlands shape identities, including criminal identities, of criminal groups and force criminal networks and activities to hybridisation, integration and osmosis, while facilitating organisational isomorphism.

For the purposes of this panel, borderlands are described as follows:

- normative: territories that are subordinated to a certain national regime and are therefore subject to the norms of its specific political system;

- economic: usually peripheral and marginal areas, from the economic viewpoint, which easily bring about welfare problems; an economic borderland is located far away from the core of the country and its economic base may be underdeveloped and one-sided.

- cultural: zones of cultural overlap characterized by a mixing of cultural styles; these are liminal spaces, not just at the edges of the nation-state, but anywhere cultures meet.

This panel seeks to bring together papers which address the challenges of researching, understanding and countering complex crimes in borderland, with a specific focus on the relationship between the borders, the territories and communities they exist in.

Ideally, papers must fit within one or more of the following perspectives on crimes in borderland:

– ethnographic accounts of complex criminality in borderlands (e.g. border zones - normative-economic-cultural, or ports, airports, etc.);

– institutional perspectives on complex criminality in borderlands (e.g. law enforcement responses cross-border; welfare state responses to economic disparity in borderland)

– perceptions and responses by borderland communities to complex criminality and security in their borderland (e.g. civil society's responses and active citizenship examples);

– reflections on the nature of complex criminal groups and networks when it comes to their activities in borderland (e.g. hybridisation of ethnic criminal networks);

– Victims of crimes in borderlands (e.g. victimisation in people's smuggling/trafficking; crimmigration; community harm);

– Ethnic enclaves, entrepreneurialism and integration of migrant communities with other communities (e.g. the role of migrant groups in exacerbating dubious connections within migrants and crime at borders; ethnic minorities and perceptions of crimes)

– Occasional, systemic and endemic corruption in borderlands (e.g. from an economic perspective as much as an anthropological and cultural one).

– securitisation of borders and securitisation of responses to criminal activities in borderland, and their effects on borderland communities, practices and cultures.

Topics beyond these are welcome provided that they address the broader topic of complex crimes in borderlands. Papers are welcome from a variety of disciplines including but not limited to criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, political sciences, law, and sub-fields such as migration studies, organised crime studies, mafia studies, urban studies, socio-legal studies, ethnography, security studies and so on.

SPEAKERS:

Masha Hassan (University of Bologna):

‘Passeurs’ of Ventimiglia: An Ethnographic Study of Migrant ‘Smugglers’

Keywords: South Asian, borderlands, Smugglers, migrant, Ventimiglia

This paper explores the phenomenon of ‘passeur’ or migrant smugglers, living in Ventimiglia, a French-Italian borderland. The migrant community has opened various eatery ventures/restaurants on the territory transforming these spaces into transit or meeting points in order to discuss, organize and make transactions. My attempt here is not to racially profile the act of smuggling by calling it ‘South Asian’ which can continue to accentuate the hijacked demonizing discourses on ‘passeurs’ as the profit driven facilitators of transnational criminal networks in Europe or elsewhere, instead, an attempt will be made to understand their role in collective community based dynamics (Sanchez, 2018) on which the South Asian migrants rely on. How they keep in touch with their old roots and at the same time learn new social settings, a continuous struggle that eaks out a unique identity. In this paper I would like to examine how they negotiate with new value consensus (Parsons, 1937) addressing questions of solidarity, ethics, morality and to reveal their understanding of closed and permeable borders.

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Costanza De Caro (Fondazione Falcone - Università degli Studi di Palermo):

Protecting victims of trafficking in human beings in borderlands through financial measures: an adequate solution to fair compensation?

Keywords: Assets confiscation; trafficking in human beings; illicit economy

The paper and the discussion which may be developed thereon intend to focus on the normative correlation between confiscation measures and the protection of victims of the emerging phenomenon of trafficking in human beings. Illicit markets are particularly attracted by borderlands, marginal and deprived areas where weak governance leads to welfare problems and criminal infiltration. International and supranational legislative instruments suggest that the so-called “four Ps” system be employed by States, requiring proactive efforts into - inter alia - prosecution and protection initiatives. To this end, the seizure and confiscation of the instruments and proceeds of trafficking offences is welcomed in order to disrupt the illegal affairs and the monetary flows orbiting around them so as to impede the reinvestment in licit or illicit businesses owned by criminal groups. Indeed, complex criminality pursues its profit-driven interests establishing a shadowed illicit economy, which shall be countered accordingly.
But confiscation also fulfils the intent to protect victims of trafficking, providing the relevant legislation that the assets deriving from the forfeiture shall flow into the Fund for anti-trafficking measures in order to secure compensation to the victims.
The advisability of such a provision - tying the assistance and rehabilitation of victims to the long unsteady course of confiscation - is questioned.

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Monica Weissensteiner:

Police information exchange across the borderland and beyond: Police and Custom Cooperation Centres

Keywords: Cross-border police cooperation - Police and Custom Cooperation Centres (PCCCs) – Schengen – information exchange – legal anthropology – global criminology

Police and Custom Cooperation Centres (PCCCs), often also simply called “Joint Centres”, have been set up in border-areas between EU member states and beyond, with the purpose of supporting operational activities carried out by national agencies in the border-area: they provide an institutionalised possibility for formal cross-border information exchange. This paper combines the tracking of this instrument through an institutional and legal genealogy, with ethnographic fieldwork data from three Joint Centres.

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Anna Sergi (University of Essex):

“Let cocaine go”. Rethinking strategies to stop the flow of drugs in commercial seaports.

Keywords: borderlands; ports; cross-border policing; cocaine trade; port security;

In large commercial seaports policing and security efforts to counter the drug trade, especially cocaine, do not appear to be effective beyond a mere displacement effect. Nevertheless, a “utopia of security” is at the core of designs of today’s ports in the western world. This approach dismisses that most ports are also borderlands, and as such become contested spaces also for illicit trade.
Drawing from knowledge gathered through qualitative fieldwork in 8 seaports (2019-2022) and specifically focusing of the case study of the Port of Piraeus (2022), this paper will sustain a counter-intuitive argument.
We can hypothesise that cross border and local policing efforts can consider the borderland when countering cocaine trafficking through seaports. Only cocaine destined to the local/national market should be subjected to disruption activities at/around the port, while cross border cocaine trade can be handled with a different approach via international cooperation, by letting cocaine go and reach its destination (to be then ‘chased’ and disrupted elsewhere). Albeit controversial, this approach might lead to 1) reduction of harm connected to the narcotics at national level by better streamlining local resources and 2) a better understanding of how the port-borderland shapes the space and the communities where it exists, also for illicit purposes.

Chair: Dennis Rodgers (Research Professor, Anthropology and Sociology, IHEID - Graduate Institute), Lene Swetzer (PhD candidate, Anthropology and Sociology, IHEID - Graduate Institute).

The proposed panel aims at bringing together scholars working on the topic of “gangs”, “gangsters” and “ganglands” to discuss theoretical and methodological approaches within and beyond anthropology. The panel proposal emanates from the ERC-funded GANGS project led by Dennis Rodgers (IHEID).
Depicted as a major source of crime, groups and individuals that are considered, and/or consider themselves to be gangs, are particularly targeted by security measures. Urban spaces across the world that are rightfully or not associated with gang activity suffer from negative mediatic and political attention. More generally, in normative thinking, “gangs” and their territories are often considered to be a security issue exogenous to their own societal realm. Yet because gangs are bound by a range of fundamental human activities, such as the exercise of power, capital accumulation, identity formation, territoriality, mobility, resistance, and/or the articulation of gender relations they present a critical lens through which to understand the world in its broader context. Departing from “gangs”, “gangsters” and “ganglands” as issues of security in global imaginaries, this panel aims to deepen the discussion and explore the intricacies of these phenomena, and the way they both endogenously and exogenously construct perceptions of security, as well as how to methodologically address these. Presentations will focus on the following topics: moral economy; gender; urban geopolitics; educational institutions & youth trajectories; security and rumours; the comparative ethnography of gangs/ganglands.

SPEAKERS:

Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam):

Extortion or taxes? Criminal leaders and fiscal authority in Kingston, Jamaica

Keywords: criminal governance, political authority, extortion, taxes, Jamaica

Through an analysis of the “fiscal” authority of criminal leaders, this paper seeks to draw new connections between illegal markets and informal governance. In Kingston, Jamaica, local leaders known as “dons” play a central role in the informal governance of low-income neighborhoods. While dons are generally involved in criminal activities, many residents of these neighborhoods consider them to be legitimate leaders, based on their provision of security, conflict resolution and welfare. In addition to income generated through legal enterprises, the economic basis for dons’ governance role derives from their longstanding involvement in illegal markets. Where much attention has gone to the involvement of criminal governance actors in drug trafficking, this paper focuses on the centrality of extortion. Dons exact payments, known non-ironically as “taxes”, from small and large urban entrepreneurs, often in exchange for the provision of protection. Like the dons’ rule more broadly, many Kingstonians, including those who are subject to such “fiscal” demands, consider these financial contributions more or less legitimate. Dons, entrepreneurs and residents go to great lengths to narrate and perform these payments as other-than-extortion. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Kingston, this paper explores how extortion can become legitimate and how dons become informal fiscal authorities. Taking seriously the framing in terms of taxation, I approach the performance of consent as an important enactment of the don’s authority. Like other forms of taxation – payments extracted and redistributed by political institutions – dons’ fiscal regimes function within a specific moral economy, within broadly shared normative understandings of who has the authority to tax whom, and what public goods they are expected to provide in return. While such understandings of fiscal obligations may legitimize dons’ power to extract payments, dons’ transgressions of the attendant norms can engender strong affective responses and directly undermine their authority.

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Paolo Grassi (University of Milano Bicocca):

Gangs of Milan, where are you?

Keywords: Street groups, rap, public space, Milan

“Gangs of Milan, where are you?”. This could be my very non-academic and “desperate” question that guided my research on gangs and street groups in Milan since January 2019. While Milan was described – at least till 2017 – as the European capital of Latin American gangs, my fieldwork could only recompose some traces of a social phenomenon that seem almost disappeared. Through an “archaeological” approach, I tried to follow some of these traces, understand what happened in the Milanese “gangland”. How did the sociability of the Milanese (migrant and non-migrant) youngsters change in the last few years? And why did it change apparently so fast? Answering these questions meant moving from a history of the Latin American street groups of the city to a social analysis of new practices connected to public space. Within this heuristic movement, I discovered rap music and the social housing neighbourhoods of Milan, and with them the construction of a glocalised imaginary that has redefined the role and the meaning of its gangs themselves.

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Alice Daquin (Graduate Institute of Geneva):

“At the end of the day, they leave and we stay.” A story of women’s navigations of journalists’ intrusion in a “gangland” of Marseille

Keywords: ganglands ; representation ; women ; drug traffic

In this presentation, I discuss how women navigate journalists’ intrusions in a so-called “gangland” of the city of Marseille. Through an ethnography of a poor and stigmatized neighborhood, I explore the multiple ways by which women become part of the economy of representations of such neighborhoods. In a context where those spaces are mainly documented by local and national media through a spotlight on drug trafficking and security issues, the presence of journalists becomes a threat but also an opportunity for its inhabitants, particularly for women. I begin by exploring the risks and mistrust that women are facing when taking on the role of mediators for journalists in an atmosphere reigned by the laws of omertá. I then turn to strategies and competitive attitudes used to attract journalist’s attention, revealing the common or differing interests between locally engaged women and journalists. I show here how stereotypical representations are contested but also used by women to advance local demands. Lastly, I rely on a case study of a journal run by local women, to analyze the conditions of emergence of alternative narratives as a form of resistance to mainstream media discourses and practices. The ways that women navigate through constraints, dependencies and resistances enables me to show how representations on ganglands are not just externally imposed on their inhabitants, but are also negotiated, contested and constructed from within.

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Lene Swetzer (The Graduate Institute Geneva):

Where there is Hash, there is Smoke?: Exploring the Blame Game of Urbano-Maritime Geopolitics

Keywords: Representation - Hash Market - Spain - Urbano-Maritime Geopolitics

In Spain, the city of Algeciras is known in the media and political speech as the national and European epicenter of narcotraffic. Strategically squeezed between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, it presents an important steppingstone between the European and African continent, to which the city and the surrounding region owes its human and natural diversity. It is also an important entrance door to Europe for the informal import of hash coming from across the Strait, specifically from Morocco. While people in Algeciras are aware of the stigma relating to the drug traffic that heavily lies upon them, narcotraffic remains an important conversation topic among Algeciranians. In this presentation I will compare the different vernacular knowledges that circulate about "el hachí’" within the respective groups. The groups mostly composed of males vary in terms of occupation, age, origin, citizenship status, political orientation, and education and income level. Speeches often refer to socio-economic, political and ethnic implications but also crystalise the important role of urbano-maritime geopolitics within the hash business and its representations on local, regional and national level. As I will show, these set the framework for a socio-spatial blame game, with different groups pointing the finger towards spatially, economically, ethnically and politically defined others to take the blame.

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Chiara Feliciani (The Graduate Institute of Geneva):

Convincing the audience: creating counter-narratives in the struggle for justice of young stigmatised men growing up (and being killed) in the "ganglands" of Naples

Keywords: Ganglands, Moral panics, Stigmatisation, Youths, Counter narratives

Drawing on ethnographic data from my fieldwork in Naples, this presentation focuses on the way the role played by the articulation of public counter-narrative as the main weapon of resistance against the stigmatisation and essentialisation of young men growing up in "ganglands". I will be focusing on cases of two young "victims of the state"; Ugo Russo and Davide Bifolco, both minors who have been killed at the hands of the police in the past decade, and subsequently portrayed as "delinquents in the making" through mainstream media. Understanding the role of moral panics at the intersection between representation, drugs and space in Naples, I come to understand the role that different media have played not only in the construction of certain territories as "ganglands" in the collective imaginary, but also on the effective action that institutions put in to place to counter drug-related violence. In a context where convincing audiences becomes one of the key elements to define political action, those who seek to dismantle stigmatising narratives centralise representation through the counstruction of counter-narratives. In this scenario, we observe a struggle for justice that takes place through murals, comic books, documentaries, photos and other images.

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Akanksha Awal (University of Oxford):

Beyond protection: women’s participation in the “land mafia” of North India

Keywords: land mafia; gang; gender; police; emotional labor

On the east of Delhi in India, the “land mafia” controls the transfer of land from farmers to developers. High-rise flats, flyovers now dot the landscape around the city. Yet, gangs now operate to enforce land tenure. However, much of the literature on urban land deals in India and in the world more broadly has focused on men (Sud 2019; Jeffrey 2014). In this piece, I address this gap: I show that Dalit (formerly referred to as untouchables) and Muslim women form a key node in both initiating sale and attracting customers to real estate deals. Drawing on the practices of the “third gender” (hijras) in North India, who acted as tax collectors before the colonial government (Hinchy 2016), women in these networks use these roles to generate greater revenues, bring customers into line through emotional repo and agility. But also undermine their own positions by using their gender. They face the brunt of the police investigations, sexual harassment, and occasional court visits. This challenges the view that gangs operate by offering “protection” to women. Instead, turn women are a pliable face of the gang, without which the organisation of the gangs will not function.

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Dennis Rodgers (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland) and Steffen Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark):

Drugs, urban space, and representation: Marseille through the double looking glass of Cape Town and Managua

Keywords: Drugs, urban space, representations, Marseille, Managua, Cape Town

In the opening scene of Bac Nord, a recent French film on (alleged) police corruption and drug dealing in Marseille, France, the three police protagonists make a daring escape from the notorious Marseille drug dealing neighbourhood of Félix-Pyat, reversing their car through a two-meter-tall barricade while running the gauntlet of a rain of detritus being thrown at them from the surrounding tower blocks, and being chased by a horde of armed youth on motorbikes. Such dramatic representations are typical, both in the media and in artistic productions about the city, and are extremely influential in shaping understandings about the nature and consequences of drug dealing and its violent construction of urban space in Marseille. In this paper we explore our discomfort with such representations in relation to our ongoing fieldwork in Félix-Pyat, in particular as seen through the double comparative lens of our previous research on drugs and urban space in Managua, Nicaragua, and Cape Town, South Africa. Our purpose is not to compare levels of violence or drug dealing, nor to suggest that there is no violence or drug dealing in Marseille, but rather to explore how the understandings we bring from Managua and Cape Town challenge a number of predominant epistemological perceptions about drugs, urban space, and violence in Marseille. This allows us to ask new and different questions about drug dealing and urban space in Félix-Pyat, opening up lines of alternative inquiry and interpretation about the nature and organization of drug dealing, its relation to urban space, and the intimacy of violence.

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Ferry Maroussia (IHEID-CCDP):

“It seems this place had always been cursed.” From racialized discourses on criminality to physical erasing of a marginalized Marseille neighborhood.

Keywords: urban planning, racialization, Marseille, space, drug, affects

One morning in November 2020, in the poor and marginalized 13th district of Marseille, a team of workers entered a small housing estate accompanied by a demolition machine. The inhabitants of the surrounding buildings left their homes little by little and approached the scene. Under their eyes, the machine began its work of destruction. Here, sixty years of human and urban history seemed to vanish in the smoke of the rubble. From this date on, and as the destruction of the house estate progressed, affects, discourses and counter-discourses circulating in and around the neighborhood started to unveil the power relations at stake when it comes to space and criminality representations of marginalized urban territories in France.
Starting from recounting the genealogy and process of a neighborhood total demolition that recently occurred in the northern part of Marseilles, this presentation will examine the institutions’ regimes of justification by historicizing its discourses. Drawing on archives explorations as well as on ethnographical data gathered during a one-year fieldwork, I will show how the phenomena of criminality, and specifically of drug dealing, are instrumentalized to explain, at first, why the social landlord and the public services abandoned this neighborhood and then to justify its demolition which occurs in a context of real estate valorization of the surroundings and is officially labelled as “social diversity policy”. These discourses being mixed with a racialized rhetoric, especially addressed toward gypsy communities, I will therefore focus on the construction of the criminal and deviant "reputation" of a neighborhood and a community as well as on the links between this reputation and the proposed "(non)urban solution". I will then address the perceptions and rhetorical strategies of the inhabitants in the face of the destruction of their neighborhood and the discourses of the institution, which I will show are in turn taken up, diverted and/or countered.

Chair: Ana Ivasiuc (Lecturer in the Anthropology of Crime and Security, Anthropology Department of Maynooth University), Martijn Oosterbaan (Associate Professor, Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University).

In recent decades, grassroots security practices that seek to complement state protection against those perceived as (potential) criminals have multiplied across various geographic and political contexts. Such practices range from neighbourhood watch programmes to border and neighbourhood patrols, and from civilian defence groups to political or religious vigilantism, in their most violent form.

Explanatory frameworks for the proliferation of informal policing generally center on the state and the perception that its institutions have failed in fulfilling their role of protection of the citizenry. Yet, the state can often be a placeholder for a number of phenomena that affect people’s perception and experience of insecurity. From the ravages of neoliberal policies and the precarisation of large swathes of populations to regime changes and the social turmoil that often accompanies them, such dynamics are mediated through materialities and socialities of everyday lives.

Our panel seeks to interrogate theoretical frameworks of vigilantism and other forms of informal policing that have hitherto focused on the state. We aim at pushing the reflection beyond the state, through the minutiae of the everyday that people who engage in such practices experience. We ask, among others:

– How do groups engaged in informal policing – border, citizen or neighbourhood patrols, civilian defense groups or religious vigilantes – legitimate and make sense of their initiatives beyond the idea of state failure?

– Which kinds of urban materialities participate in the multiplication of informal policing practices?

– What economic, religious, social, or political practices are intertwined with practices of informal policing?

– Which kinds of moralities and social orders played out in the everyday become implicated in practices of informal policing?

We seek to explore such and other related questions by means of ethnographically informed accounts of informal policing and vigilantism in different contexts both from the so-called ‘global South’ and the ‘global North’.

SPEAKERS:

Tobias Neidel (Leipzig University):

The production of order through the vigilante gaze - neighbourhood watches and informal policing in Germany

Keywords: informal policing, community policing, social control, social order

Neighbourhood watches and other similar groups of informal policing seem to pursue an allegedly simple goal: the protection of their neighbourhoods and the strengthening of the inner cohesion in their communities. Therefore, these groups promote and develop a system of mutual control which is ubiquitous and specific at the same time. On the one hand, they encourage people to embed various forms of crime prevention in their everyday life, such as the installation of security cameras or the routinely observation of neighbouring properties. On the other hand, neighbourhood watches are often characterized by the organization of regular patrols through their social proximity in search of criminals. At the heart of all these activities lies the expectation that their actions are in accordance with a given social order. What gets neglected is the fact that these practices do not only enforce a given image of normality but rather constitute it in the first place. By referring to my own ethnographic fieldwork among two neighbourhood watches in Germany I would like to further examine the connections between the private execution of security and the idea of social order. My aim is to show how informal policing contributes to the production and realization of an expected social order, which determines the everyday life in the neighbourhood community.

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Hayal Akarsu (Utrecht University):

“Police without uniforms”: Citizen Forces and State-Sponsored Vigilantism in Turkey

Keywords: police, policing, vigilantism, informing, reform, citizenship, Turkey

In the last 15 years the Turkish National Police have invested heavily in “community policing,” espousing the belief that a strong police-public relationship will curtail authoritarian policing and police violence. Yet this reform has intensified popular desires for more policing and fostered a new type of citizen-police subject, what I call citizen forces. It is often assumed that vigilantism occurs when the state leaves a power vacuum or when citizens want to bypass the state and the rule of law altogether. The new role of a “citizen force” challenges the argument that vigilantism depicts a type of agency that is beyond the boundaries of legitimacy. The purportedly liberal tool of community policing turned the previously despised figure of the police informer into a respected practitioner of engaged, responsible, and vigilant citizenship. When functioning as ancillary police forces, citizen forces can help consolidate state power and aggravate state repression, especially against suspect Others. Emerging mostly at the neighborhood level, such forms of policing and politicization demonstrate the increasing complicity and mutual constitution of police and citizens, as well as the formation of state-sponsored vigilantism.

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Corina Tulbure (University of Barcelona):

"Convivencia" and the making of the vigilant citizen

Keywords: vigilant citizen, suspicion, racial city, social vigilance

Based on ethnographic material, I analyse, beyond the institutional surveillance, how the vigilant citizen is made, encouraged, and recognized by the authorities in the city of Barcelona, paradoxically in name of convivencia (a controverted concept that means togetherness and public order). This vigilant citizen acts in collaboration with institutional patrols, deploying subtle forms of social vigilance on illegalized people living in urban space. As a result, a hierarchical relationship was established between the neighbours based on suspicion and the punitiveness of the illegalized people (undocumented migrants or rejected asylum seekers), where the vigilant citizen gained a new agency. In addition, online groups and “citizen patrols” were formed to police the public transportation and central areas of the city. I analyse how the perception of insecurity produces a social and racial order in the city, based on confronting the vigilant citizen and the punishable one.

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Manuel Mireanu (Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania):

Defending the City: Vigilant Activism Against Marginalised People in Timişoara, Romania

Keywords: security; vigilantism; denunciations; activism; Romania

Seeking a departure from a body of literature that researches vigilantism as enacted by groups, I interrogate the ways in which individuals can also practice vigilance. Using a mix of participant observation and discourse analysis, I look at two civic activists from the Romanian town of Timişoara, Cristi Brâncovan and Ştefan Cojocnean. They have been enacting similar varieties of vigilant agency, without becoming part of a larger citizen vigilante movement. Their actions include reporting, campaigning, exposing and denouncing various categories of marginalised people living in Timişoara, such as Roma people or refugees.
This informal policing generates a discourse on justice in which ‘worthy citizens’ are not only participating, but actively creating retribution. The activists are ‘defenders of the city’, and the media is unanimously praising their actions. Because of this protective function that they claim to embody, their actions gain a wide societal consensus.
The Romanian civil society perceives the state as being too ‘soft on crime’ because of corruption and mafia. These two actors call for violence against their ‘targets’ by mobilising public opinion towards a collective effort of alertness and preparedness. Thus, security becomes a civic duty, through which these actors call upon the state to improve its repressive function and join the common societal effort to ‘protect the city’.

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Eveline Dürr (Institut für Ethnologie, LMU Munich):

Watchful “suspect subjects”: Vigilance and (In)security in the US-Mexico borderlands

Keywords: US-Mexico Borderland, coloniality, watchfulness, (in)security, migration

This paper draws on ethnographic research in the US-Mexico borderlands, where racialized immigration policies and increasing state surveillance are promising "security" in the face of immediate threats looming across the border. This paper directs the focus to individuals, who are perceived as potential threats or criminals because of their phenotype and therefore watched as “suspect subjects” by others. As a consequence, these watched subjects become watchful themselves and incorporate vigilant practices in their everyday lives in order to establish security for themselves and for their community. This paper shows how these everyday vigilant security practices are framed as “a way of life” by some actors and, in some cases, also are related to notions of sacredness and spirituality. Further, this paper theorizes multiple constellations of vigilance as situated practices which add to political subject formation and hold a decolonizing potential which possibly empowers disadvantaged actors.

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Ana Ivasiuc (Maynooth University, Ireland):

Beyond the State: Space and entrepreneurship in contemporary practices of vigilantism in Europe

Keywords: vigilantism, informal policing, neighbourhood patrols, urban space, far-right, Bürgerwehren

Practices of informal policing, sometimes bordering on violent forms of vigilantism, have multiplied in Europe over the last decade. Neighbourhood patrols, civilian defense groups, or citizen border patrols are often understood as consequences of the imaginary of a ‘failing’ state unwilling or unable to protect its citizens.
The paper analyses explanatory frames of contemporary vigilantism practices in Europe that go beyond the narrative of state failure. On one hand, the spatial dimension accounts for the ways in which transformations of the urban space over the last decades are related to a growing perception of urban insecurity that has spurred some of the practices of informal policing. The data used to articulate this argument stems from ethnographic engagement with an Italian neighbourhood patrol in the peripheries of Rome, where urban neglect and an incipient degentrification process spurred patrols who defend the neighbourhood against those perceived to be the cause of urban decline. On the other hand, political entrepreneurship offers an alternative frame for explaining the recrudescence of practices of informal policing. Using data collected in Germany on Bürgerwehren, this analytical frame takes civilian defense groups as initiatives of individuals who pledge and demonstrate allegiance to the far-right NPD party.

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Leonardo Brama (Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Università degli Studi di Perugia; INCT-InEAC Instituto de Estudos Comparados em Administração de Conflitos):

The militias of Rio de Janeiro between security, protection and markets

Keywords: urban violence; protection; security market; militias; Rio de Janeiro.

In Rio de Janeiro, the ‘milícia’ category (militia) has been gathering, in recent years, practices and forms of organization of heterogeneous criminal groups that range from groups of ex-policemen who organize to “put order” in the area to heavily armed groups and logistically well organized that act illegally and coercively on different fields, structured by economic and political network that reach the core of the state.
Contrary to what conventional theories say about it, militias inform state-building practices that can be explained more by the state presence and less by its supposed absence. The implicit or explicit support to militias that was promoted by state representatives over time, together with the difference in treatment reserved by public security policies in relation to other phenomena (such as drug trafficking), point to a certain state sensitivity about its priorities in public agenda regarding the local urban violence. This, led militias to increase their border and their profits.
Then, from interviews with people living in an ‘área de milícia’ (militia-controlled areas), ethnographic data collected in field work, documents and newspaper articles, this paper examines the reciprocal relationships between security and protection, illegal monopolies and practices intertwined with militias of Rio de Janeiro.

Chair: Clara Rigoni (Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law).

Although the discourse around crime and immigration is not new, in the last two decades, the European public debate on so-called parallel societies has focused increasingly on cultural and religious aspects (instead of socio-economic ones) linked to crime within immigrant communities. Among the communities at the centre of this debate are especially those characterised by extended family structures with patriarchal and hierarchical traits, codes of conduct inspired by collective conceptions of honour and shame, high levels of group solidarity and loyalty expectations, coupled with high levels of negative social control, as well as isolation from the larger society. Next to the largely debated issue of religious terrorism, some of these groups come to the attention of the authorities because they are active in organised crime but also for the high levels of inter- and intra-family violence. The responses of European countries, often driven by populistic demands, have been overly punitive and have included zero-tolerance policies and ad hoc (symbolic) legislation against these forms of family-based (organised) crime. These measures have had the result of targeting, sometimes disproportionately, entire communities, thereby hindering integration of their members into the wider society. At the same time, investigative and enforcement procedures as well as support mechanisms for victims, witnesses and (former or potential) offenders have not adequately been (re)shaped. As a result, within these communities, levels of cooperation with the authorities and access to justice remain very low. Through an analysis of case studies, the panel will address the major consequences of such criminal policies and try to sketch alternative approaches.

SPEAKERS:

Anna Sergi (University of Essex, UK):

Deviant Migrant Identities & Mafias: reflecting the transcultural transformations of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta in Australia and Canada

Keywords: mafia; 'ndrangheta; transculturalism; migrant communities; mafia mobility; Australia

The ‘ndrangheta is a mafia-type organisation from Calabria, Italy, particularly well known for its international presence, in Europe and in Canada/Australia primarily, its involvement in the cocaine trade, and its family structure. Notwithstanding their capability to commit crimes cross border, the ‘ndrangheta is a traditional mafia, rooted in Calabrian cultural traditions and values, which the clans manipulate and exploit for their advantage. When countering this mafia abroad, the family structure and the cultural features of the ‘ndrangheta are often misunderstood and/or underestimated. Policing activities tend to focus solely on the crimes committed and on dubious ethnicity links among individuals.

By focusing specifically on the ‘ndrangheta in Australia and Canada, in this paper I will argue that the engagement with the cultural and family features of this mafia group, when abroad, is a necessary component to understand both the clans’ success and effective ways to counter their crimes. Intergenerational changes, technological evolution, and law enforcement actions surely have affected the ways in which ‘ndrangheta clans pursue their business, as well as their resilience in these countries. At the same time, these variables have contributed to cultural transformations within Italian migrant communities. These cultural transformations, I argue, might also affect mafia resilience, understood as ‘deviance’ from mainstream migrant identities.

In this paper I will reflect on the transcultural nature and hybridisation of the ‘ndrangheta in Australia and Canada, as deviant component of Italian migrant communities. I will reflect, for example, on the impact that ethnic enclaves, ethnic entrepreneurialism, and changing identities of Italians (and Calabrians) have had on the ‘ndrangheta families and dynasties in these countries.

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Vincenzo Scalia (Università degli Studi di Firenze):

Looking for the juju. The criminalisation of Nigerian migrants in Italy.

Keywords: Prostitution, Nigeria, Immigrants, Italy, Juju.

This paper will highlight the process of criminalization of Nigerians by focusing on the different perspective on migration: a mainstream literature relates migration to smuggling and exploitation, thus encouraging the approval, as well as the enforcement, of anti-trafficking laws. The other perspective, combining the human rights with the feminist approach, emphasises the freedom of choice by migrants, in particular the choice some women made consciously to work in sex industry to put money away and support their families at home. As a consequence of this, the legalisation of migration, as well as of prostitution, would have positive effects on society, both because it would provide millions of women with a legal status enabling them to claim for some basic entitlements (housing, health, education) and because it would reduce the criminal trafficking related to sex industry.

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Clara Rigoni (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law):

Alternative Dispute Resolution or Parallel Justice? Results from a Study on Conflict Resolution within Immigrant Communities in North Rhine-Westphalia.

Keywords: parallel justice, organized crime, family violence, clan crime, alternative dispute resolution, Germany

In the last ten years, the German public debate has increasingly focused on the phenomenon of so-called “parallel justice”. This (negatively connotated) term refers to alternative dispute resolution mechanisms existing within immigrant communities and based on traditional or religious rules and authorities. These mechanisms are used to solve a variety of conflicts, especially in organized crime settings but also for intra and inter-family violence and are particularly widespread among minority groups characterized by extended family structures and clans. The paper will discuss the results of a qualitative study conducted in North Rhine-Westphalia and based on questionnaires, interviews and focus groups with judges, prosecutors and law enforcement agents, caseanalysis and round tables with experts. The study was aimed at gathering data on the existence of alternative mechanisms, especially among families active in organized crime (so-called Clan Crime), at analyzing together with practitioners, the instruments at their disposal and at providing guidelines in order to ameliorate the cooperation between these communities and state authorities in crime control.

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Mahmoud Jaraba (Erlangen Centre for Islam and Law in Europe (EZIRE)):

“Arab Clan Crimes” in Germany: Hysteria or Real Threat?

Keywords: Clan Crimes, Germany, Dresden’s Green Vault, Big Maple Leaf

Spectacular robberies, such as the heist of Dresden’s Green Vault (2019) or the heist of the 100kg gold coin (Big Maple Leaf) from Berlin’s Bode Museum (2017), have generated intense media coverage and aroused much debate in Germany. More so when members of the so-called “Arab clans” were arrested and accused of organising the robbery. In recent years, “Arab clans” have been subjected to a high level of government and media scrutiny, and accused of establishing a criminal “Mafia” based on their family structure and networks. “Clan” structures have proven very difficult to police and disrupt to the extent that it has caused media and political hysteria. This has led to public outrage, with the “clan” notion itself commonly associated with criminality, parallel societies, segregation, violence and forced marriage. Despite the public furore, hardly any empirical research has been conducted on the topic, in order to better understand the phenomenon of “clan crimes”, from a scientific perspective in a socio-historical and cultural context. In my presentation, which is based on my findings from over 6 years (2015 to 2021) of ethnographic fieldwork in Germany - I will address the impact of family, social, economic and religious networks on the emergence of so called “criminal clans” in Germany. From first hand observation and utilising in-depth interview data collated over an extensive period, my primary objective is to explain how and under what conditions “clan crimes” have emerged in Germany. A further aim is to try to understand how this has evolved in relatively larger complex socio-economic contexts in Germany, without stereotypes, prejudices and generalisations.

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Arantxa Ortiz (Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, United States):

Distributing (In)Security after 9/11: Expanding Driver’s License Access as a Matter of “Public Safety”

Keywords: criminalization; security; identity documents; immobility.

After partially attributing the collapse of the Twin Towers to non-citizens’ “weaponization” of driver’s licenses, the U.S. Congress passed the REAL ID Act of 2005. Through this mandate Congress introduced identity securitization protocols for driver’s licenses in order to prevent non-citizens from boarding domestic flights and entering federal buildings. Thus, 9/11 catalyzed a significant shift for the governance of immigrants’ domestic mobility. I draw on ethnographic research on the Massachusetts driver’s license campaign for illegalized residents to illustrate the implications of the federal securitization of identity documents on state-level policy. In Massachusetts both activists and opponents of the bill frame licenses as a “public safety” measure; supporters contend that licenses will make “everybody safer,” while opponents regard them as “threats to public safety.” I demonstrate how activists’ framing of licenses as “public safety tools” has allowed them to gain local law enforcement’s endorsement, and consequently, legislative support for the bill proposal. I argue that paradoxically, activists have only been able to legitimize the bill by turning it into a safety measure, and by enlisting the support of the very same agencies and state officials who produce insecurity for immigrant drivers.

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Stefano Becucci (Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Florence):

Nigerian criminal groups in Palermo

Keywords: Nigerian criminal cults, Cosa Nostra, drug trafficking, sex exploitation

The proposal is aimed at examining the Nigerian criminal groups in Palermo. The questions from which the research starts are: which Nigerian criminal groups are present in the city? What is their internal organization? What criminal activities are they involved in? Finally, what relations exist (if they exist) between Nigerian criminal groups and Cosa Nostra? To answer these questions, different types of information were gathered through an investigation carried out in Palermo between September and October 2020. During this period, judicial material was collected on recent proceedings against Nigerian criminal groups operating in the city; prosecutors from the local Anti-Mafia Directorate who dealt with both mafia crime and Nigerian criminal groups were interviewed; some members of local police who investigated both criminal phenomena were interviewed; interviewees from some NGOs in the city were interviewed, the Benin City Women's Association which deals with Nigerian trafficked women, the Anti-racket Association made up of local entrepreneurs and traders; an NGOs involved in developing the culture of legality against mafia; finally, interviews were carried out with a Nigerian cultural mediator and various people of the civil society, experts and non-experts of organized crime, who reported their knowledge and experience about Cosa Nostra in the city. Thanks to the information gathered through the field research, it has been possible to elaborate some answers related to the research questions listed above.

Chair: Agata Chełstowska (Post-Doc Jagiellonian University), Agata Dziuban (Professor at the Institute of Sociology of Jagiellonian University), Carmen Grimm (Research Assistant, Europäische Ethnologie at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin).

Writing on youth in the context of the war in Guinea-Bissau, Henrik Vigh coined the term navigation to capture agency and everyday practices in contexts of change, turbulence and instability. Navigation grasps individual actions as ‘motion within motion’ - i.e. movement in a moving environment. A focus on interactivity allows accounting for the complex and dynamic interplay between social forces shaping individual practices, and, most importantly, how those practices themselves contribute to or intervene into the unfolding of environments as livable, unstable or turbulent.

The concept of navigation is particularly useful in grasping agency under conditions of criminalisation. We understand criminalisation broadly to include the application of criminal law, crime control measures and imaginaries of (il)legality. Furthermore, building on extensive literature on the ‘penal turn’ in contemporary democratic governance, we understand criminalisation as both responses to, and sources of, the politics of threat and uncertainty currently dominating social and political life. Increased criminalisation, designed to control practices, identities and ways of being has contributed to prolonged “chronic” conditions of crisis defined by insecurity, instability and social opacity for the implicated actors. For example, research in the fields of migration, drug use or sex work policy has shown that increased reliance on criminalisation translates into experiences of hardship as social actors are compelled to create and reconfigure their overviews of their own positions, changing environment, and possible strategies of action.

In this panel we invite papers that examine the ways in which differently situated actors — criminalised subjects and their social networks, official and unofficial law enforcement agencies, and other persons and institutions directly and indirectly implicated through criminal law — are affected by, act upon and interact with the effects of criminalisation that constitute their lived realities. We welcome both empirically oriented studies examining navigational strategies in the context of criminalisation, as well as theoretical presentations critically engaging with the concept of navigation in reference to criminal law and law enforcement.

SPEAKERS:

Keketso Peete (University of the Witwatersrand):

Sickness as a moral justification for committing a 'crime': The Subjective experiences of people who use the nyaope drug in Soweto, South Africa

Keywords: Sickness, morality, criminality, nyaope, herion, South Africa

In a Soweto Township, ' Valleydale', South Africa, people who use a criminalised street drug popularly known as ‘nyaope’ have the reputation of being criminals in the community. These claims where not in any way denied by some users. Instead, a moral justification in a form of sickness was provided as a reason for commiting acts of 'crime', even though they recognised them as ‘wrong’. Ho kula (to be sick), resonated with many of my participants’ descriptions of the drug’s withdrawal symptoms, which necessitated the constant use of nyaope and financing, through resorting to petty crime. The paper proposed, a product of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted between October 2018 and January 2019, will show how sickness is used as a moral justification by people who use nyaope to morally justify their behaviours that are perceived and declared wrong or criminal by the public and the state. I argue they use the metaphor of withdrawal symptoms as sickness to seek for empathy rather then the usual judgment and punishment, by bringing their subjective experience to the level of comprehension and resonation to those who have never encountered them.

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Agata Dziuban (Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University):

Navigating policed abandonment of the sex worker community in the context of COVID-19 pandemic in Poland

Keywords: sex work, criminalisation, policed abandonment, navigation, COVID-19, Poland

Just two weeks after the introduction of the first lockdown and epidemic-relate state of emergency in Poland, Sex Work Poland - a small, informal collective working on behalf of sex workers - created a Crisis Fund for sex workers. This fund raised money for sex workers who, due to the coronavirus outbreak and accompanying restrictions, found themselves in a critical situation and were not covered by any governmental support programme. In my presentation, I will analyse this example of sex worker community’s grassroots self-organisation as an expression of collective care and an attempt to navigate the state's (necro)politics of abandonment towards sex workers. First, I will demonstrate the mechanisms and practices of criminalisation that contribute to exclusion of sex workers from governmental support schemes. Second, drawing on theoretical conceptualisations of necropolitics (e.g. Agamben, Mdembe) and of abandonment (e.g. Biehl, Povinelli, Willis), I will capture these political, legislative and implementation mechanisms and practices of exclusion in terms of a politics of abandonment, involving the withholding of institutional protection, support or assistance in crisis. Thirdly, I will interpret Sex Work Poland's community-based, extra-institutional interventions (in the form of the Crisis Fund and other collective actions aimed at sex workers in Poland in the context of the pandemic) as an anti-necropolitical praxis embedded in an ethic of radical solidarity and care. Finally, following Henrik Vigh, I will conceptualise this grassroots practice of mutual aid as a form of social navigation in the context of pandemic crisis.

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Justyna Struzik (Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University):

Survival and solidarity practices in the criminalisation machine - The case of drug use in Poland.

Keywords: drug use, Poland, survival and solidarity practices, criminalisation

While conducting interviews among people who use opioids in Poland, I repeatedly heard stories about police violence, criminal cases and prison experiences. Many of these stories related directly to the possession or trafficking of psychoactive substances. Often, however, the court cases were related to other activities or experiences of people who use drugs, such as petty theft, rent and alimony arrears, involvement in fights, public order disturbances. In the interviewees' stories, the criminalisation of drug possession, as well as insufficient implementation of harm reduction programmes and widespread narcophobia (including that occurring in public institutions, e.g. health care facilities) forces drug users to undertake various (il)legal activities in order to survive and function socially. The machine of criminalization, which I define as a continuous but sometimes contradictory processes that seek to maintain the status quo and fabricate the subjectivity of drug users and the social imagination about drugs, does not work ruthlessly, leaving space for agency. In my presentation I want to look at experiences of people who use opioids on two levels. On the one hand, I will discuss the navigation of the criminalisation machine, which aims at survival. This will include activities such as acquiring substances, taking care of one's body, and ensuring one's own meals and lodging. On the other, I will look at practices that serve solidarity with other users (e.g. sharing drugs, lending a place to sleep, sharing information about friendly doctors). These navigating practices will serve me to better conceptualize the notion of the criminalisation machine.

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Agata Chełstowska (Jagiellonian University):

Rough seas: navigating abortion and criminalization

Keywords: abortion, navigation, criminalization, agency, law, medicalization

The criminalization of abortion in Poland is constituted by a complex set of rules, policies and imaginaries of illegality, which are far from stable or predictable. Moreover, the 2020 tightening of the abortion ban, excluding fetal malformation from the list of conditions qualifying for a legal abortion, further affected women’s experiences, the practices of medical staff and political discourse. These changes resulted for example in at least three known cases of pregnant women dying in hospitals due to treatable pregnancy complications, because doctors hesitated to evacuate a fetus, presumably in connection with the new version of the abortion legislation. The changing, unclear and unevenly implemented rules concerning abortion constitute a crimscape that could be described as a “moving environment” in Henrik Vigh’s approach to the concept of “navigation”. My aim is to map out the consequences of the 2020 legislation and the strategies of social navigation in three types of social actors: pregnant people, medical professionals, and abortion activists. Namely, I trace the effects of further criminalization on the practices and discourses of doctors; the erosion of public trust for hospitals and medical profession; and the development and growth of complex international activist networks, facilitating at-home, demedicalized abortion as well as international abortion migrations. The paper is based on an ongoing, multi-sited ethnographic study conducted as part of the CrimScapes project.

The publication laboratory aims to facilitate ideas about future publications based on conference papers.

Chair: Rano Turaeva (Ludwig Maximillian University of Munich and Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle), Aleksandr Kupatatdze (Senior Lecturer of criminology at Kings College London), Petr Kupka (Researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of West Bohemia).

This panel will bring together scholars who investigate power, crime, and their intersections with corruption both in the Global South and the Global North. As we examine state and non-state actors’ involvement in illicit activities, like corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, societal and environmental harms, our goal is to question the concept of the state and that of legitimacy, legal or moral. By challenging existing analytical bias, we seek to complicate simplistic definitions of crime within state and non-state actors, as well as the division of the political, administrative, judicial, and business arenas. In fact, while it is possible to make a distinction, for example, between organized crime and corruption, this distinction may not be relevant in many instances. The complexity of contemporary corruption involves widespread interactions between state officials and organized crime, as well as individuals and groups brokering across both public and private spheres, rerouting financial flows in ways rarely legally recognized as corrupt while still affecting society. Researchers are often faced with different methodological challenges when attempting to understand the crimes of the powerful, and must therefore develop original approaches and analyses in order to do so. We are interested in papers that offer an analysis of:

– The overlaps between organized crime, corruption, state, and corporate crime.

– Corruption, clientelism, patrimonialism analyses from within state networks as well as the private and corporate sectors.

– Moral economy of fraud and corruption, but also trickery and deviance from recognized social norms.

– Comparative analyses of criminal networks comprising representatives of the “underworld” and the “upperworld”.

This panel is also be part of the LUXCORE conference Elites, Corruption and the ‘Defiance Industry’, project 313004 funded by The Research Council of Norway, taking place in Bologna from May 19-20, 2022.

SPEAKERS:

Aleko Kupatatdze (Kings College of London):

"Examining the Overlap Between Corruption and Organised Crime: Evidence from the Field"

Keywords: organised crime, corruption, complicity, complacency, Eastzern Europe, North Africa, Latin America

The paper addresses the involvement of state-affiliated actors in illegal trade of consumer products. It makes two key arguments a) the distinction between organised crime and corruption is not relevant in some instances because it is difficult to distinguish between the two when state officials are profiting from criminal activity and b) politicians are often directly complicit in this type of criminal activity and hence protection theory needs to be revised to reflect that. Illegal trade is often viewed as cross-border crime perpetrated by non-state actors that occasionally [or not] are protected by corrupt government officials. However, this perspective treats the involvement of state-affiliated actors as a by-product of corruption in public office and often produces the wrong perception of criminality as a field mainly populated by non-state actors. Combining different investigative techniques including interviews, network and documentary analysis the paper problematises this view and systematically study the problem trade in countries of Eastern Europe (Montenegro and Ukraine), North Africa (Morocco and Libya) and Latin America (Paraguay and Argentina). This paper develops a typology and testable model by looking at the range of involvement from complacency to complicity; this includes 'turning a blind eye' to protection and direct participation.

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Rano Turaeva (LMU Munich):

Soviet policing regimes: Policing migration and illegal practices of Police officers, judges and security officers in Russia and Central Asia.

Keywords: Central Asia, Russia, policing regimes, post-Soviet policing, migration, residence permits

The paper will closely engage with post-Soviet policing regimes compared in Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan) and in Russia. Policing regimes include not only police officers and practices of policing residents and citizens of the relevant countries but also other means, practices, actors, legal and illegal means used and abused by both state and non-state officials. The examples brought in the paper draw on the ethnographic material from Moscow in Russia but also past research in Central Asia. The examples of the racketing practices performed by city police against migrants in Moscow, deportation regimes implemented by justice system and other state and non-state actors contribute to the argument of the paper namely how post-Soviet policing system function and continuous of blurring boundaries between legal and illegal makes the base of the whole system of policing.

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Georgios Karamanos (Lifeline Hellas):

Political Corruption in Greece: Revisiting the Case of Akis Tsochatzopoulos

Keywords: Greece, financial crimes, political corruption, elites

The paper aims to explore the culture of institutionalised political corruption in Greece by analysing the case of former member of the Hellenic Parliament and Minister of Defence, Akis Tsochatzopoulos, who was prosecuted and ultimately convicted for multiple illegal activities regarding financial crime and corruption. Firstly, the paper proceeds to describe the qualitative dimensions of the numerous financial crimes that were committed by Akis Tsochatzopoulos and his elite network, as well as the historical and sociocultural conditions that normalised corruption for politicians of his era. Furthermore, the paper employs multiple theories of white-collar crime in order to deconstruct the profile and analyse the mindset of a politician whose name became synonymous with accusations of political corruption. The paper concludes that, although the case of Akis Tsochatzopoulos remains the most notorious prosecution of political corruption in Greece’s post-crisis era, it is solely a minute fragment of a larger institutionalised problem that characterises the political and economic elites of modern Greece. Therefore, the essay closes by proposing multiple policy suggestions and institutional reforms that could allow the Hellenic justice system to face political corruption in a holistic fashion and to confront the systemic conditions that perpetuate the existence of a culture of corruption for Greece’s elites.

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Asror Kayumov (National University in Tashkent):

Livestock trade and brokerage in Uzbekistan: criminal procedure and agreements

Keywords: livestock, bazar, brokers, dallol, institution of "brokerage", markets for livestock

Uzbekistan has historically developed a wide range of livestock under natural conditions. Its borders with Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, where livestock production is booming, have led to the formation of markets for livestock products. For this reason, livestock markets such as "Paishanba Bazar", "Juma Bazar", "Shanba Bazar" are formed. In Uzbekistan, different social strata of the population are connected with livestock markets. There is a huge amount of cash circulating in these markets. Large investors and government officials have a vested interest in building, organizing, and managing livestock markets as part of their business.
Investors rely on special managers – brokers (dallol) - to keep livestock markets under their control. Brokers are the dealers of their own livestock businessmen, and the growth of market prices and sales depends largely on them. Although there are official guidelines and procedures for the operation of this market, in fact, it operates on the basis of verbal agreements, non-verbal agreements. Any client who is engaged in animal husbandry and is interested in it is forced to reckon with the dallol in the livestock markets. In such livestock markets, the institution of "brokerage" (dallollik) performs a specific management function, setting prices and controlling informal procedures. This increases the viability of criminal cases and concealment of criminal cases in livestock markets.

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Ioannis Gaitanidis (Chiba University):

Fictitious Billings and the Regulation of Spiritual Sales in Contemporary Japan

Keywords: Japan, consumer fraud, spiritual sales, fortune-telling

In July 2019, the Consumer Contract Act, one of the regulatory texts that aim to protect Japanese consumers from fraud, was amended to include several new clauses which expanded the type of acts that can form the basis for revoking a contract. One of those clauses specifically addressed ‘spiritual sales’ (reikan shōhō), a general term targeting the services of psychics and fortune-tellers. In the last thirty years, Japan has seen an exponential increase of complaints against these types of services, but, as I argue in this paper, this is not necessary a reflection of the anti-religious sentiment that followed violence perpetrated by the infamous religious organisation Aum Shinrikyo in 1995. Interviews with providers of such ‘spiritual services’ and lawyers specialising in ‘spiritual frauds’ reveal complex entanglements between consumers’ changing expectations and the rise of ‘integrity’ as a critical factor in evaluating the general quality of a business. Contrary, therefore, to classic arguments connecting secularisation to the heightened regulation (or even criminalisation) of certain religious activities, I argue that shifts in patterns of consumption and today's common problem of ‘fictitious billing’ may too lead to novel ways of regulating religious services.

Chair: Pablo Holwitt (Lecturer at the Institute of Anthropology at Heidelberg University), Rivke Jaffe (Professor of Urban Geography, University of Amsterdam)

In recent years, humans have increasingly outsourced the task of producing security and fighting crime to non-human entities. CCTV cameras observe public spaces in cities worldwide; predictive policing algorithms calculate where crimes are likely to occur; and members of the affluent classes enrol various technological devices and animals to protect themselves from the ‘dangers’ of poverty. These moves are often justified through references to non-human entities’ alleged efficiency, objectivity or rationality, in comparison to humans. Eliminating the human factor from security measures is thus legitimised as a step towards a regime of safety that is free from human bias, prejudice and discrimination. At the same time, it is precisely this (apparent) elimination of the human factor in contemporary security measures that generates concern regarding the ethical implications of investing non-human entities with the responsibility to uphold justice and punish crime. These concerns draw on popular dystopian visions of a security apparatus that entirely escapes human control.

This panel seeks to complicate such binary narratives and starts from the assumption that the introduction of non-human entities into securityscapes does not imply the displacement of human beings. Rather, we argue that securityscapes are increasingly shaped by entanglements between human and non-human entities, leading to more-than-human mediations of security. It is precisely the lived realities and political implications of these entanglements and mediations that this panel seeks to understand: How do different non-human entities – from electronic alarm systems and algorithms to firearms and security dogs – mediate security practices in everyday life? How do they shape understandings of causality, responsibility and culpability in relation to crime and insecurity? What practical and ethical fault lines emerge through such mediations? How effective are they in generating a sense of safety or leading to actual changes in crime patterns? How are they challenged? The panel invites contributions that engage with these questions by drawing on ethnographic research that highlights how humans and non-humans interact in various security and crime-control initiatives.

SPEAKERS:

Veronika Nagy (Utrecht University):

Self-censorship in a Digital Asylum

Keywords: surveillance technology migration digital mobile

In the last decennia, affective aspects and perception-based policies dominate global mobility control and digital surveillance measures. However, these practices are increasingly challenged by new user strategies, in particular in the daily use of connected phone devices. Following the critical surveillance studies tradition of qualitative data analyses, this paper explores how unattractive mobile groups, - considered as suspects of terrorism and organised crime - are increasingly circumventing mobile surveillance mechanisms within and even outside the virtual walls of Fortress Europe. Due to tech literacy and surveillance awareness, digital policing practices are increasingly challenged by ‘smart’ user incentives, altering the remotely governed interactions between newcomers and border control authorities. Most studies are focusing on the content and techniques of these countersurveillance activities, including data transmission and shared social media content. Yet, there is hardly any attention paid on the ‘silences’ and social filters that are instrumentally used to ensure safe travel and to protect social networks in digital proximity.
These modifications can be traced by ethnographic studies that are able to interpret the situational understanding of self-censorship in daily practices of smart phone users migrants. Using multisited analysis of refugee surveillance, this research addresses countersurveillance incentives in the EU and how surveillance subjects as forced migrants from conflict countries use smartphone applications to prevent legal expulsion. By implementing the mobility paradigm in criminological studies, this project includes methodological techniques in which online and offline interactions are intertwined to fully trace spatial, social aspects of participants’ decision-making. The central question of this paper is: Based on the imaginaries of safe connectedness- , how can the different silencing methods of smart phone user refugees can be classified, that is also interpreted as digital self-censorship practices on the move?

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Pablo Holwitt (University of Heidelberg):

Reimagining safe urban transport in COVID-19 era urban India

Keywords: Safety, urban transport, COVID-19, body, India

This paper discusses the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic – and by extension the COVID-19 virus as a non-human actor – transforms existing notions of safe urban transport in India by taking a look at changing practices of urban mobility in the business of platform-based cabs in Delhi and Mumbai. Since the outbreak of the pandemic in early 2020, platform-based cab aggregators like Uber and Ola strive to develop measures that minimize the risk of getting infected with COVID-19 while traversing densely populated Indian cities inside the confined space of a cab. These measures encompass various technological and material interventions, including plastic screens being installed in cabs to spatially segregate the bodies of drivers and passengers or surveys being conducted to ascertain compliance with a new regime of physical distancing and sanitization. In some ways, these measures link to pre-pandemic concerns over safe urban transport in Indian metropolises based on gender and class differences between cabdrivers and passengers, but they also divert from them by introducing a biomedically informed notion of safety that is rooted in a universal conception of human bodies. As a result, measures aimed at guaranteeing safe urban transport in times of COVID-19 both exacerbate and subvert existing social inequalities in urban India.

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Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam):

The Tree as Weapon: securitizing through planting and uprooting trees in Israel/Palestine

Keywords: Trees Securitization Israel Palestine Violence

Trees are significant for their economic, environmental, and spiritual value, and in that they symbolize people’s rootedness to the earth. They green our surroundings, and more importantly, they are the lungs of our earth. The momentum of this environmental awareness, however, can also have a darker, less visible side. States and non-state organizations promote tree planting as an environmental or economic “magic bullet,” aiding nationalist political agendas by “greenwashing” them (de Freitas Netto et al. 2020). Because of their significance for people, trees can become powerful political tools for both state and non-state actors.
Here I will look at trees as part of the Israeli securitization of Palestinian land and its inhabitants. Zionism is known for attaching a powerful symbolism to tree planting (Braverman 2009; Long 2005), as it represents the rootedness of the Jewish people in the “Promised Land,” today’s Israel. At the same time, both settler movements and the Israeli state are involved with the uprooting of trees in and around the Occupied Palestinian Territories, for so-called security reasons and to gain control over this occupied land. I will analyze here how trees then are, in several different ways, integral parts of the securitization of land and people.

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Hayal Akarsu (Utrecht University):

Techno-Police: Digital Technologies and More-than-Human Securityscapes in Turkey

Keywords: policing; digital technologies; more-than-human security; securityscapes; reform

Digital tools and technologies, from biometric systems to big data analytics, have dramatically changed practices and sites of policing and state surveillance in the last decade. These technologies transform how state authorities and the police (as a crucial node in a broader security/knowledge system) classify, govern, and organize bodies and spaces in both virtual and material worlds. In their wake, the future of policing seems to be powered by analytics and algorithms. But what are the effects of new digital tools and communication mediums on more-than-human mediations of security and policing? Drawing on my ethnographic research on Turkish police reforms between 2015 and 2017 and my interviews with officers from cyber-crime units, representatives of social media companies, and digital-rights activists in 2021, this talk explores entanglements of analog and digital forms of policing and security. My ethnographic research reveals how the digitalization of policework goes hand in hand with what we might call analog policing techniques and ideologies. Exploring such continuities is important not just to analyze the changing nature of more-than-human securityscapes, but also to unsettle techno-optimistic and epochal formulations sometimes attached to the digitalization of politics and selves.

This is a special panel devoted specifically to papers that address crime, criminalization and security in a way that does not fit into other existing panels. The papers will be selected by the AnthroCrime network and the chairs from among those who submitted contributions.

SPEAKERS

Bouna-Vaila Andromachi and Papanis Efstratios (University of Aegean):

Is it rape? Comments from rape defense lawyers

Keywords: rape, rapist, victim, male domination, victim’s unconscious consent

Rape is a highly complex and multiple interpreted phenomenon of violent aggression, and is the research object in various fields of knowledge. The power relations between the two sexes are extended on the basis of a model based on the complete control of the female body, which is considered the property and, consequently, an asset of the male family members. Sexual violence is a distinct form of violence differing from all other kinds in that the gender body plays a leading role. The concept of the body is a cultural, historical, linguistic and social construct rather than it is strictly of nature, as it has provided each culture with the material basis to construct its imaginary significations, and, thus, to build political systems, systems of exploitation and power relations. The main feature of rape, which makes it different from other forms of violence, is the male rapist’s conviction that he did not commit violence against the woman, since the male pleasure in the power-property relationship has been almost self-evident and able to eliminate violence to the extent that it gives a sense of legitimacy in practice. The present study was conducted in Greece, to 20 lawyers defending rapists. The semi-structured interview was the key methodological tool of our empirical, qualitative research. The results of the research show that the defense arguments are built on gender stereotypes. All the lawyers believes in the male rapist’s belief that he does not commit acts of violence against women. The connection of masculinity with energy and strength and femininity with passivity and submission has created a widely accepted perception of sexuality in which the man is expected to be the active and the woman the passive subject, that is, the man is expected to try to entice and seduce and the woman to be enticed and seduced, is the main idea of the most lawyers defenders of rapists in the research. Finally, the meaning and limits of the consent of women were the key to defending male rapists.

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Buse Nur Egin (University of Bologna):

The Evolution of Mega Gangs in Venezuela: the Case of Tren de Aragua

Keywords: Criminal Violence, Mega Gangs, Organized Crime, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua

This paper aims to display the formation and the development of Tren de Aragua mega gang in Venezuela by analyzing several factors that contributed to its expansion. Over a decade, the panorama of crime had changed in Venezuela: violent crimes by small-size youth street gangs were already widespread in Venezuela because of the social exclusion of young men from low-income sectors. We now observe sophistication of criminal activities such as transnational drug trade, kidnapping of high profiles, robbery, extortion, illegal mining, etc. conducted by larger-scale complex criminal bodies called mega-gangs. The reasons behind this were; the corruption of state and security officials, zonas de paz (peace zones were abandoned by law enforcers) provided mega gangs impunity, deepening economic crisis, and the Covid-19 Pandemic had pushed existing gangs to seek more profitable activities since there are fewer opportunities for petty crimes. Among other reasons, the institutional weakness and lack of control in prisons resulted in the formation of prison gangs called pranes. With overcrowded population and state abandonment, prisons turned into micro-states of criminal circles, moreover, become accomplices of mega gangs. The case of Tren de Aragua stands as a great example due to its complexity and impact. Started as a railway construction syndicate in the state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua now has criminal cells across the region and neighboring countries. Since 2015, it was ruled by Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, “Niño Guerrero", who is based in the Tocorón prison. Today the gang has members more than 2700 members and conducts criminal activities across the region; Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru.

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Ravshan Abduzohirov (National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek):

Gypsies (Lo‘li) - an outlaw community of Uzbekistan.

Keywords: "luli", "zhugi", "mazang", "mugat", "cultural traditions", "criminal life".

In Central Asia, most Lo‘li live in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. In Uzbekistan, they are called "luli, zhugi, mazang, mugat." The exact number is unknown. According to 1989 statistics, there are 16,397 Lo‘li in Uzbekistan. In the cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Andijan and Namangan in Uzbekistan there are separate neighborhoods inhabited by them.
In particular, in the Fergana Valley, the Lo‘li living in the cities of Andijan and Namangan are compact. According to local data, by 2021, more than 5,000 Lo‘li live in the Gulistan district of Namangan. About 50% of them do not have a passport. Many Lo‘li say they do not need a passport. This is because most Lo‘li do not have a place to live or their homes are not officially registered as private property. According to them, legalized houses are taxed and they consider it an extra expense. They believe that not getting a passport exempts them from various responsibilities before the law.
For example, in the Guliston neighborhood, a 1,200-seat secondary school has about 994 Lo‘li students. However, their school attendance is very low. This is due to the fact that their parents forcibly involve their children in illegal economic activities.
Today, in Uzbekistan ethnographic material on the relatively closed lifestyle, economic life, and cultural traditions of the Lo‘li, which encourages criminal life enables to provide more information about them.

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Tinatin Khomeriki (Ilia State University):

Modernising Security: Vernacular (In)Securities in Tbilisi after the Rose Revolution

Keywords: vernacular (in)security, post-Soviet transformations, Rose Revolution

Georgia's Rose Revolution of 2003 was followed by a range of economic, social, and cultural transformations often wrapped up in the notion of modernisation, the latter being associated with the concepts of Europeanisation or Westernisation in both the official and public discourse. One of the significant cases of such modernisation was the modernisation of security. Aiming to reclaim the state monopoly on violence previously taken over by informal actors, the revolutionary government introduced the anti-mafia legislation, the reform of the police, and a campaign popularizing “the culture of lawfulness”. The goal of this project was not merely to eliminate criminality, but also, to start a wide-scale “mental revolution” that would increase the respect of Georgians towards the law and law enforcement state institutions.
Based on the analysis of the official and public discourses, the paper will discuss how vernacular meanings of (in)security are negotiated between top-down and bottom-up perspectives on the intersection of national and local understandings of the concept. The paper will also try to shed some light on how vernacular meanings of personal in(security) in the public space of Tbilisi are marked with deep ambivalence while they waver between the notions of the West/Russia, modernisation/backwardness, formality/informality, and criminality/lawfulness.

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Leonie Jantzer (Leuphana University Lüneburg):

Interpretations of security among forced migrants in collective accommodation

Keywords: security perception, security needs, refugee camps, (criminalisation of) refugees, police

Previous findings in German-speaking research on refugees and camps point to numerous situations of insecurity for refugees in collective centres: The living situations of the residents are precarious. It can be assumed that in addition to criminal offences, social and individual (in)security and uncertainty also contribute to the feeling of safety. However, there is a gap in the research when it comes to the investigation of aspects that contribute or are even elementary to a sense of security and safety among refugees in collective accommodation. Part of my dissertation project follows on from this:
What meanings of security can be reconstructed from the statements and practices of refugees in the context of life in such accommodations? Which social situations (also outside the facilities) evoke a sense of security among them? What role does the police play?
The research is qualitative-interpretative with an ethnographic orientation. The aim is to work out a subject-oriented sense of security that manifests itself in socially contextualised situations. It is important to find out where and through what refugees feel safe. In addition, refugees' practices and (implicit) (agency) knowledge of finding safety are also of interest.
Finally, the aim is to include the perspectives of refugees, which are underrepresented in the security discourse on refugee migration, to relate them to police perceptions and to critically question the prevailing construction of migrants and refugees as a danger.

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Anita Lavorgna (University of Southampton):

Crime in the big data era: challenging imaginaries of smart security

Keywords: datafication; digital harms; social harms; smart policing; smart security; crime risks

Data-driven technologies that have emerged as part of contemporary datafication phenomena are being deployed for a range of tasks in crime and security settings, with experimental algorithmic tools influencing police resource allocation, intelligence and surveillance-led policing, but also sentence severity and prison security classifications among other things. These technologies – often labelled as ‘smart’ as based on artificial intelligence tools – are at the basis of a new security apparatus that is challenging the boundaries between the public and the private, and that is creating a number of major ethical and political issues in its transformative potential aiming to reduce and mitigate crime risks. This presentation will offer a critical account of how smart security technologies are portrayed, the major limitations of current regulatory attempts, and the need of sociotechnical and qualitative research approaches to understand and conceptualise the digital and social harms they can cause.

Delinquent ethnography? 25 years of gang research in Nicaragua and elsewhere.