Organized crime is now a major threat to all industrial and non-industrial countries. Using an inter-disciplinary and comparative approach this book examines the nature of this threat. By analysing the existing, official institutional discourse on organized crime it examines whether or not it has an impact on perceptions of the threat and on the reality of organized crime.
The book first part of the book explores both the paradigm and the rationale of policy output in the fight against organized crime, and also exposes the often 'hidden' internal assumptions embedded in policy making. The second part examines the perceptions of organized crime as expressed by various actors, for example, the general public in the Balkans and in Japan, the criminal justice system in USA and circles within the international scientific community. Finally, the third part provides an overall investigation into the realities of organized crime with chapters that survey its empirical manifestations in various parts of the world.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, criminology, security studies and practitioners.
Part 1: Discourse and Definitions 1. Discoursing Organized Crime: Towards a Two Level Analysis? 2. The Criminal not the Crime: Practitioner Discourse and the Policing of Organized Crime in England and Wales 3. The Evolution of the European Union's Understanding of Organized Crime and its Embedment in EU Discourse 4. International Policy Discourses on Transnational Organized Crime: The Role of an International Expertise Part 2: Perceptions 5. Transnational Organized Crime and the Global Security Agenda: Different Perceptions and Conflicting strategies? 6. Evolving Perceptions of Organized Crime: The Use of RICO in the United States 7. The Yakuza and its Perceived Threat 8. The Social Perception of Organized Crime in the Balkans: A World of Diverging Views? Part 3: Reality 9. The Fire behind the Smoke: The Realities of Human trafficking in Northern Ireland 10. Organized crime in transition-era Bulgaria: The Elites and the State 11. Organized Crime and Local Politics in Contemporary Italy: Willing or Unwilling Bedfellows? 12. The Crime-Terror Nexus: Do Threat Perceptions Align with 'Reality'? Conclusion: Getting to Grips with the Deconstruction of Organized Crime
