Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization - Paperback

by Willem Van Schendel (Editor), Itty Abraham (Editor)

Illicit Flows and Criminal Things offers a new perspective on illegal transnational linkages, international relations, and the transnational. The contributors argue for a nuanced approach that recognizes the difference between "organized" crime and the thousands of illicit acts that take place across national borders every day. They distinguish between the illegal (prohibited by law) and the illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable), which are historically changeable and contested. Detailed case studies of arms smuggling, illegal transnational migration, the global diamond trade, borderland practices, and the transnational consumption of drugs take us to Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America. They allow us to understand how states, borders, and the language of law enforcement produce criminality, and how people and goods which are labeled "illegal" move across regulatory spaces.

Author Biography

Willem van Schendel is Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and head of the Asia Department of the International Institute of Social History. His publications include The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia.

Itty Abraham is Director of the South Asia Institute and Associate Professor of Government and Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State and co-editor of Southeast Asian Diasporas.