Crime and criminal justice after communism: Why study the post-Soviet region?

Abstract

This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to consider how criminology in the region itself might develop. In this introduction, we present three distinct theoretical contributions that research on postSoviet crime and criminal justice can make to the global scholarly community.First, we discuss the theoretical utility to criminologists of the post-Soviet transition. Transitions to democracy and the market, whether in South America, Africa, or the former communist bloc, are notable for rapid increases in crime. Yet, we suggest that the transition paradigm now holds diminishing value, after two decades of post-Soviet development in which post-Soviet states have diverged substantially in both incidence of crime and responses to it. Second, as a corollary, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent development of its successor states provide a natural experiment that helps us understand divergence in crime and criminal justice policy. The FSU provides rich opportunities for both intra-regional and inter-regional comparison. It thus has much to offer to the rapidly developing subfield of comparative criminology.

Constraints on the growth of private policing: A comparative international analysis

“…Nonetheless, in contrast to Anglosphere societies, in post-Soviet societies, the initiative for private security development came from the state, not the private sector, following a cataclysmic political transition. Certainly, factors such as income inequality, incapacity of public police services and new ‘mass private spaces’ figure in this story: crime and inequality did rise across post-Soviet countries in the 1990s (Slade and Light, 2015), and these trends surely generated demand for private security. However, their role is secondary in both significance and sequence.…”

The Devil is in the Details: Drug-Trafficking and Corruption in Kazakhstan

“…This chapter engages with theoretical perspectives related to drug-trafficking in Central Asia. According to Slade and Light (2015), the vast majority of modern criminology departments are housed in North American and Western European universities, where scholars understandably are more interested in understanding conditions close to them. Equally understandably, these scholars of criminology depends on the political, social and economic factors in a given country (Reuter, 1983;Paoli, 2002;Zaitch, 2002).…”

“…The dysfunctionality of post-Soviet legal systems shortly after collapse of the USSR partly conditioned emergence and rise of informal governance in the form of the Russian Mafia (Varese, 2001;Volkov, 2016) Moreover, in these circumstances, legal institutions were perceived as unreliable and people preferred the informal rules, norms and practices that had emerged during the Soviet times (Galligan & Kurkchiyan, 2003;Ledenova, 2006). Lotspeich (1995, quoted in Slade andLight, 2015) argues that crime is a product of specific transition, such as weakness in law enforcement, unclear regulation of economic activity, lack of property rights protection and decline in living standards. On the other hand, whether communism, capitalism or transition was to blame for the crime waves in the former Soviet Union, the region is still dealing with the legacies of the initial post-independence crime waves (Slade and Light, 2015).…”

“…and criminal justice do not have access to post-Soviet data that can challenge their geographic bias. Therefore, the adoption of theories and concepts should be careful and, on some occasions, a considerable adaptation of some standard criminological theories or even development of entirely new concepts is required (Slade & Light, 2015). Moreover, when it comes to understanding organised crime, both theory and theoretical perspectives are underdeveloped (Kleemans, 2014).…”

“…Special attention must be paid to these elements. Therefore, the post-Soviet contextincluding not only institutional legacies that have proven to remain a subtle and yet powerful force, but also far broader processes in the former Soviet Unionwill be incorporated into the analysis, in an effort to understand and explain the role of massive political processes and their effect on phenomena of interest to criminologists (Slade and Light, 2015;Varese, 2001;Volkov, 2014).…”