Georgios Papanicolaou

Crime, war and global trafficking: designing international cooperation, by C. Jojarth

In this age of modern era, the use of internet must be maximized. Yeah, internet will help us very much not only for important thing but also for daily activities. Many people now, from any level can use internet. The sources of internet connection can also be enjoyed in many places. As one of the benefits is to get the on-line crime war and global trafficking designing international cooperation book, as the world window, as many people suggest.

Review of Combating Human Trafficking: Gaps in Policy and Law: by Veerendra Mishra. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2015. 286+xvi pages. ISBN: 978-93-515-0253-1,

Almost two decades after the dramatic reemergence of human trafficking as a major issue in the post-Cold War, globalizing world, and the intensive policy developments aiming to address it at national, regional, and global levels, the field is naturally ripe for sober reassessment. Veerendra Mishra’s book, Combating Human Trafficking: Gaps in Policy and Law, is an interesting and significant contribution to this task. The book draws its added significance from the fact that the author brings in a wealth of insights and experience on dealing with the issue because of both his professional background as a police investigator and his involvement in policy implementation in the developing world, that is, in geographical and political contexts where the prevalence and severity of the issue are impossible to ignore. Mishra is thus well placed to offer both the broadest and most thorough overview and evaluation of policy developments as well as insights drawn from well-defined local and regional contexts. The book’s well-founded premise is that, despite important policy developments that have helped establish definitional clarity and certainty in the issue area, most notably the protocol to the 2000 United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime, it would be impossible to develop a comprehensive policy approach without taking seriously the spacial, temporal, operational, and cultural aspects of trafficking. Mishra thus sets out to identify gaps in law enforcement, criminal justice, and multiagency and civil society responses, drawing on examples from a variety of jurisdictions but particularly from the context of his home nation, India. It is particularly this latter aspect that adds considerable weight to the author’s call for the importance of taking the above structural facets of the issue seriously—a globalizing, allencompassing approach towards trafficking is less likely to capture particular aspects of how the issue of trafficking presents itself and is experienced in diverse contexts. Mishra is by no means dismissive of wide-ranging developments such as the Palermo Protocol. In fact, the analysis begins precisely from some critical, thoughtful stocktaking of the definitional advances brought about by the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC) Protocol and more recent developments and then moves on to identify the shortcomings of the Palermo definition of human trafficking. Even though Mishra’s claim is that the latter “has served its lifetime and now there is need to redefine human trafficking” (p. 25), his misgivings are more concerned with the need to add focus to the protocol’s definition rather than with a wholesale reorientation. His claim is that we need a definition that is more attentive to the spatiotemporal particularities of the process of trafficking, the particularities of the diverse forms of trafficking, and to the needs of the victims as those who suffer the human rights violations that lie at the heart of the issue.

49.95 (hardcover).

This chapter draws on archival and other sources to offer an exploration of the socio-political context of smuggling and of official responses towards it during the period of the Italian rule of the Dodecanese between 1912 and the beginning of the Second World War. An analysis is developed of how local socio-economic conditions and the wider geopolitical context underpinned the development of the response of the Italian administration. It is argued that the gradual transition from a largely tolerant to a stricter approach towards smuggling generally relates to changes in the socio-political context of the Italian rule and particularly the relations between Italy and the Ottoman Empire after the Italo-Turkish war of 1912. The account offered contributes to arguments against the dominant current tendency to approach illicit economic activity and ‘organised crime’ as devoid of historical context and separate from the ‘upperworld’ realities.

Smuggling in the Dodecanese Under the Italian Administration

This book has argued for a radical rethinking of transnational policing that builds on what is essentially a very simple idea: the study of policing cannot be separated from an understanding of the key institution that secures capitalist rule in society, the state, and the study of transnational policing cannot be separated from a study of the processes that involve states in the reproduction of capitalist power at worldwide level. The case on which this idea has been put to work, the story of the Mirage Operations that emerged from the last three chapters, is markedly different from any account that explanations advanced so far in the study of transnational policing would be able to offer. The first three chapters of this book have explained why such a difference should exist. But it is now possible to take stock and ask: what sort of story is it? What do we learn from it?

Conclusion: The Mirage of Transnational Policing

The results of preceding chapter suggested that the explanation of a range of issues underpinning the asynchronies and contradictions of transnational policing at the international level, and more specifically at the level of the international police organisation, should be sought at the level of national police structures. In this chapter, therefore, the entry point to the history of the Mirage Operations is an account of their gestation and implementation within a site of national policing, Greece. The theoretical argument this work offers is thus fully developed with this case study.

Policing Sex Trafficking in Greece

The preceding chapter has explored a range of difficulties that current theorising on transnational policing faces in explaining its object, the nature and logic of the mission, of the actors and of the actions it involves. The development of this field of study, driven by the evolving demands for knowledge posed by its immediate institutional sponsors and the established problematics of its parent disciplines, has produced a distinctive explanation of the empirical manifestations of the internationalisation of police activities. Prior work has admitted international agency to the police by detaching it from the monolithic subjectivist imagery of the sovereign state.

Imperialism, the State and the Police

The preceding chapter has approached the emergence of the new anti-trafficking regime from a historical viewpoint and at a global level. These analyses provide the general context of the Mirage Operations as a particular event. This chapter takes a different vantage point to explore how this layer of relations has entered into developments at the regional level of Southeast Europe. Among wider social and political processes, the concrete organisational arrangements of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) Centre are also found at this level.

Politics and Policing Sex Trafficking in Southeast Europe

The aim of this chapter is to develop in detail and to substantiate the idea that the existing literature on transnational policing relies on a theoretical vocabulary whose deficiencies hinder the systematic explanation of the phenomena it is concerned with. What follows is an assessment of an ensemble of works whose theoretical significance consists in advancing explanations of the organisational activity patterns associated with transnational policing. The result of this operation will be to identify the areas where these deficiencies lie, and to suggest how a materialist perspective can contribute towards the construction of an adequate, theoretically pertinent, concept of transnational policing.

The Study of Transnational Policing

A characteristic of the Mirage Operations that stands out immediately is the formulation of their objective, the targeting of human trafficking, specifically the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation,1 and illegal migration as forms of (transnational) organised crime. This is the most suitable entry point to their story, as it involves the most general condition of their emergence, namely the formulation of the problem that these police operations sought to address. In fact, the fusion of organised crime, sex trafficking and illegal migration in the objectives is not coincidental, but rather reflects the core rationale of what can be called, following Ethan Nadelmann (1990), ‘the new global prohibition regime on human trafficking and prostitution’, as it evolved in the 1990s and after. ‘New’ differentiates the contemporary intent and practical state of a series of international rules and law enforcement approaches from their ‘traditional’ focus, associated with the repression of ‘white slavery’ and prostitution.