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What role does law play in post-communist societies? This book
examines the law as a social institution in Eurasia, exploring how
it is shaped in everyday interactions between state and society,
organisations and individuals, and between law enforcement and
other government entities. It bridges the gap between theoretically
rich work on law-in-action and the empirical reality of Eurasia.
The contributions in this volume include research on policing, the
legal profession, public attitudes towards law, regime support and
oppositional mobilisation, crime policy, and property rights, among
others. The studies shift away from the common perception that, in
Eurasia, the law exists only as a tool for the state to enforce
order and suppress dissent. Instead, they show, through empirical
analyses, that citizens evade, use, reinterpret and shape the law
even in authoritarian contexts-sometimes containing state violence
and challenging the regime, and other times reinforcing state
capture from below. The chapters in this book were originally
published as a special issue of the journal Europe-Asia Studies.
In response to a growing human trafficking problem and domestic and
international pressure, human trafficking and the use of slave
labor were first criminalized in Russia in 2003. In Trafficking
Justice, Lauren A. McCarthy explains why Russian police,
prosecutors, and judges have largely ignored this new weapon in
their legal arsenal, despite the fact that the law was intended to
make it easier to pursue trafficking cases.Using a combination of
interview data, participant observation, and an original dataset of
more than 5,500 Russian news media articles on human trafficking
cases, McCarthy explores how trafficking cases make their way
through the criminal justice system, covering multiple forms of the
crime-sexual, labor, and child trafficking-over the period
2003-2013. She argues that to understand how law enforcement
agencies have dealt with trafficking, it is critical to understand
how their "institutional machinery"-the incentives, culture, and
structure of their organizations-channels decision-making on human
trafficking cases toward a familiar set of routines and practices
and away from using the new law. As a result, law enforcement often
chooses to charge and prosecute traffickers with related crimes,
such as kidnapping or recruitment into prostitution, rather than
under the 2003 trafficking law because these other charges are more
familiar and easier to bring to a successful resolution. In other
words, after ten years of practice, Russian law enforcement has
settled on a policy of prosecuting traffickers, not trafficking.
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