Repositioning sovereignty? Sovereign encounters with organized crime and money laundering in the realm of accountants

Abstract

This article repositions sovereignty on the basis of a study of recent regulatory approaches to organized crime and money laundering. The spread of techniques across administrative domains is traced through organizational documents and interviews with practitioners, and related to an observed trend toward integration between policing research and regulation research. The same trend, however, assigns sovereignty to the periphery. A richer notion of sovereignty is recovered through a reading of the classical theorists, and used to tease out the articulation of sovereignty in current state strategies. Theorizing 'sovereignty at the center' as opposed to 'sovereignty at the periphery' challenges basic assumptions about the relationship between the state and economic activity, and in particular about the utility-oriented character of state violence.

Duties to Distrust: The Decentring of Economic and White-collar Crime Policing in Sweden

“…The existent research tends to concentrate on individual cases of the development of state-organized private policing in relation to fraud (Levi 1987(Levi , 2008, money laundering (e.g. Hall 1995;Levi 2008;Egan 2010;Favarel-Garrigues et al 2011;Svedberg Helgesson 2011;Hörnqvist 2014), illegal cartels (Morgan 2008) and the company auditor role (Larsson 2005a;2005b). Few studies discuss the general tendency we identify here-i.e.…”

“…As noted by Gill (2002) and Hörnqvist (2014), there is little communication between these two research areas (cf. Gill 2013;Williams 2005).…”

Neoliberal security provision: Between state practices and individual experience

“…An emerging “penal state” was diagnosed at the turn of the century. From the outset (Garland, 2013; McLennan, 2001), the concept evolved in a US context to account for the dramatic increase of imprisonment, but it has since spread to encompass other aspects of the “punitive turn” on both sides of the Atlantic, associated with the “war on drugs”, organized crime, terrorism, or border control (Bosworth and Guild, 2008; De Giorgi, 2013; Hörnqvist, 2014; Shammas, 2016). While the “penal state” has been called an “undefined synonym for recent penal trends” (Rubin and Phelps, 2017: 424), the trends themselves are rarely disputed, and as long as the term “state” is not reified, it may be used as a short-hand for the substantial increase of coercive interventions in the areas of national security and criminal justice observable in most Western countries.…”

Regulating business or policing crime? Tracing the policy convergence between taxation and crime control at the local level

“…In terms of legal domains, contemporary police organizations regularly work in multi‐agency partnerships stretching far beyond the criminal justice sector and are also reliant on administrative legislation (Mazerolle & Ransley ). For instance, the recent approach to organized crime employs the legislation on taxation, accounting, company forms, and bankruptcy to sanction activities associated with organized crime (Hörnqvist ). Conversely, criminal law is utilized to discipline business.…”

“…For instance, regulatory agencies in the financial sector have been found to adopt intrusive monitoring and punitive sanctions, demanded by the anti‐money laundering regime (Favarel‐Garrigues et al . ; Hörnqvist ). The policing literature, on the other hand, tends to stress the very opposite: the persuasive, cooperative, technical, value‐neutral interventions carried out by state organizations outside of the criminal justice sector, often in cooperation with private bodies, in order to manage crime or anti‐social behavior (Crawford et al .…”