Call for Papers Special Issue of the journal Global Crime

Organised Crime in History

Organised crime is often considered an essentially modern phenomenon. To some it is a product of the influx of immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century, brought to the boil in the Prohibition years. Especially adventurous souls may look even further back into history, to the seventeenth-century pirates who ravaged the Atlantic and the Caribbean.

However, the roots of organised crime are in primal human characteristics: the natural tendency for criminals to band together and specialize; the weaknesses of state and community institutions and the opportunities this creates for illegal structures; and the patronage and corruption existing within every body politic. Thus, from the protection racketeers of Ancient Rome to Aztec cocoa-bean counterfeiters, the murderers-for-hire of the original Assassins of Alamut to the fifteenth-century French Coquillards, organised crime has always lurked in the shadowy underside of organised society.

This special issue of the journal Global Crime, will be edited by Mark Galeotti, visiting professor at the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers – Newark, USA, and director of the Organised Russian & Eurasian crime Research Unit at Keele University, UK. It seeks to reclaim the history of organised crime around the world and explore its many ways and forms and in particular its relationship to its host society. Contributions are welcome from historians, archaeologists, political scientists, criminologists, anthropologists and any scholars willing to cast a light into these shadows. The intention is that this special issue may also be published in book form.

Global Crime is a peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge devoted to high-calibre scholarship on serious and organised crime. Its coverage is not just on Organised crime in the strict sense, but on a wide range of criminal activities, from corruption, illegal market transactions, state crime and terrorism. This focus is deliberately broad and multi-disciplinary, its first aim being to make the best scholarship available to specialists and non-specialists alike. It endorses no particular orthodoxy and draws on authors from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, economics, political science, anthropology and area studies. Visit the web page of the journal.

The deadline for submitting abstracts to Dr Galeotti (GlobalCrime@gmail.com) is 1 April 2006. We expect to receive the papers by 30 September 2006.