Gilles Favarel-Garrigues

FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE: Who cares?

While critical academic studies on financial surveillance blossom, they hardly pay attention to the critical capability of those who are involved in the implementation of anti-money-laundering/countering terrorist financing (AML/CTF) policy. In this paper the authors attempt precisely this analysis of existing mobilizations which contest the everyday implementation of AML/CTF standards. Which practices are at stake? Who are the actors involved in denunciation? Which argumentation is used? What are the normative positions from which actors raise criticism? Are denunciations shared by a wider public or do they remain sector-specific? This paper brings together empirical results from research conducted separately by the two authors on, respectively, the gradual institutionalization of the role of banks in anti-money-laundering efforts in France and Switzerland and European measures against terrorist financing.

A Power Horizontal. The Public–Private Enforcement of Judicial Decisions in Russia

Based on fieldwork done in Ekaterinburg, this article deals with the enforcement of legal decisions about economic disputes in the late 2000s in Russia. As state employees, bailiffs are responsible for the implementation of court decisions but their efficiency depends on the cases they deal with. In the most successful cases, they are backed by private enforcers, hired by the claimant and often coming from the law enforcement agencies. This common work reflects an informal public–private partnership from below in which bailiffs and private enforcers co-execute judicial decisions. Such autonomous public–private power configurations at local level challenge the governmental claim to build a ‘power vertical’ in Russia from the top.

Introduction: Violence, Crime, and Political Power

“The globalization of crime,” the rise in power of “world mafias,” the proliferation of large transnational crime networks behind increasingly extensive and lucrative smuggling operations (narcotics trafficking, arms dealing, illegal raw materials trade, counterfeit goods, extortion of migrant workers, etc.): on the basis of these alarming reports, organized crime was presented as one of the main threats to the economic and political world order during the 1990s. Many observers expressed concern, widely picked up by the media, that a new “mafia empire” had arisen, corrupting markets and government institutions, and undermining the material and moral foundations of liberal democracies.1 A growing number of experts, magistrates, senior police and military officials, political leaders, journalists, and academics alerted the public to this threat that was expanding in the shadow of globalization and the “retreat of the state.”2 International organizations attempted to prevent and combat organized crime more diligently than in the past. Promoting interstate judicial and police cooperation, they have encouraged governments to enact special legislation against it (in particular by establishing the specific crime of membership in a criminal organization) and to reinforce the institutional apparatus required for combating it (intelligence and specialized crime units, procedures for monitoring financial flows, development of undercover investigation techniques).3 This intense mobilization led to the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime in December 2000 in Palermo.