This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the illegal extraction of metals and minerals from the perspectives of organized crime theory, green criminology, anti-corruption studies, and victimology. It includes contributions that focus on organized crime-related offences, such as drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, extortion, corruption and money laundering and sheds light on the serious environmental harms caused by illegal mining. Based on a wide range of case studies from the Amazon rainforest through the Ukrainian flatlands to the desert-like savanna of Central African Republic and Australia's elevated plateaus, this book offers a unique insight into the illegal mining business and the complex relationship between organized crime, corruption, and ecocide. This is the first book-length publication on illegal extraction, trafficking in mined commodities, and ecocide associated with mining. It will appeal to scholars working on organized crime and green crime, including criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars. Practitioners and the general public may welcome this comprehensive and timely publication to contemplate on resource-scarcity, security, and crime in a rapidly changing world.

This book contributes to the literature on organized crime by providing a detailed account of the various nuances of what happens when criminal organizations misuse or penetrate legitimate businesses. It advances the existing scholarship on attacks, infiltration, and capture of legal businesses by organized crime and sheds light on the important role the private sector can play to fight back. It considers a range of industries from bars and restaurants to labour-intensive enterprises such as construction and waste management, to sectors susceptible to illicit activities including transportation, wholesale and retail trade, and businesses controlled by fragmented legislation such as gambling. Organized criminal groups capitalize on legitimate businesses beleaguered by economic downturns, government regulations, natural disasters, societal conflict, and the COVID-19 pandemic. To survive, some private companies have even become the willing partners of criminal organizations. Thus, the relationships between licit businesses and organized crime are highly varied and can range from victimization of businesses to willing collusion and even exploitation of organized crime by the private sector - albeit with arrangements that typically allow plausible deniability. In other words, these relationships are highly diverse and create a complex reality which is the focus of the articles presented here. This book will appeal to students, academics, and policy practitioners with an interest in organized crime. It will also provide important supplementary reading for undergraduate and graduate courses on topics such as transnational security issues, transnational organized crime, international criminal justice, criminal finance, non-state actors, international affairs, comparative politics, and economics and business courses.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the illegal extraction of metals and minerals from the perspectives of organized crime theory, green criminology, anti-corruption studies, and victimology. It includes contributions that focus on organized crime-related offences, such as drug trafficking and trafficking in persons, extortion, corruption and money laundering and sheds light on the serious environmental harms caused by illegal mining. Based on a wide range of case studies from the Amazon rainforest through the Ukrainian flatlands to the desert-like savanna of Central African Republic and Australia's elevated plateaus, this book offers a unique insight into the illegal mining business and the complex relationship between organized crime, corruption, and ecocide. This is the first book-length publication on illegal extraction, trafficking in mined commodities, and ecocide associated with mining. It will appeal to scholars working on organized crime and green crime, including criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and legal scholars. Practitioners and the general public may welcome this comprehensive and timely publication to contemplate on resource-scarcity, security, and crime in a rapidly changing world.

How do top-level public officials take advantage of immunity from foreign jurisdiction afforded to them by international law? How does this privilege allow them to thwart investigations and trial proceedings in foreign courts? What responses exist to prevent and punish such conduct? In Between Immunity and Impunity, Yuliya Zabyelina unravels the intricate layers of impunity of political elites complicit in transnational crimes. She examines cases of trafficking in persons and drugs, corruption, and money laundering that implicate heads of state and of government, ministers, diplomats, and international civil servants. Zabyelina shows that, despite the potential of jurisdictional immunity to impede or delay justice, there are prominent instruments of external accountability to minimize the impunity of criminal political elites. Accessible and compelling, this book provides novel insights for readers interested in the close-knit bond between power, illicit wealth, and impunity.

The book offers important insights into the transformation of transnational courtship. Specifying the poly-semantic variety of the latter concept and an overview of dichotomous perspectives in social scientific and political activist studies, ' the author 'clarifies major characteristics of the history, revenues, and information and communication technologies of the mail-order bride industry.' Y. Zabyelina focuses on 'an extremely important issue, which usually is not considered as an international communication problem. Yet, she has clearly shown, how ICTs and website marketing have transformed and enormously expanded the scope and profitability of mail-order bride agencies. She has also sketched how this development re-enforces various inequalities and prejudices on a transnational scale.' 'On the basis of the still rather limited research done before and of her own empirical analysis, she has contributed to enlightening one of the dark sides of the otherwise mainly praised internet communication revolution.' - Dr. Peter Ludes, Ph.D. (USA), Professor of Mass Communication, School of humanities and Social Sciences, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany