Ales Zavrsnik

University of Ljubljana · Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law

The chapter’s central thesis is that the use of automation tools in social control and politics, erodes some of the basic concepts of the rule of law and changes the knowledge that counts as relevant for policymakers. The authors provide a historical overview of how both the theory and practice of crime and social control have relied on contemporar...

The automation brought about by big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence systems challenges us to reconsider fundamental questions of criminal justice. The article outlines the automation which has taken place in the criminal justice domain and answers the question of what is being automated and who is being replaced thereby...

The article focuses on big data, algorithmic analytics and machine learning in criminal justice settings, where mathematics is offering a new language for understanding and responding to crime. It shows how these new tools are blurring contemporary regulatory boundaries, undercutting the safeguards built into regulatory regimes, and abolishing subj...

Today, at a time when we are witnessing the “multiplication of borders”, borders are occupying new domains. The article focuses on the erection of digital borders by means of biometric technology, which is creating new knowledge through the compilation of large biometric databases in the EU. By “tattooing” borders onto immigrant bodies, disciplinar...

Big data and algorithms are the glue of the digital surveillance capitalism. Software runs in several social domains, which have an impact on our lives: from health care to employment and university enrolment, to bank loans and insurance policy conditions. What makes big data analytics especially appealing for the crime control agencies is the prom...

This paper focuses on the uses and consequences of big data and predictive analytics in social control. After tackling the issue of defining "big data", the paper presents the implications of big data in the production of knowledge. It then focuses on selected domains of informal and formal social control, such as policing and criminal justice syst...

The chapter presents the initial definitions of drones and unmanned aerial systems by examining the various areas in which they have been deployed. The range of uses of drones inevitably triggers contradictory reactions, and drone development often comes with an emotional charge as drones tackle important human values. The chapter situates drones i...

The chapter takes as its starting point the insight that contemporary surveillance is dynamic and not hierarchically structured and that (supervisory) power also generates resistance to the (same) power. The increasing power of the “new surveillance” therefore not only increases the capacity of the authorities (watchers) to monitor the watched majo...

Mobile devices have become the central node information-communication technology as they include functionalities far surpassing simply making a phone call. Along with the merging of services and functionalities on a single mobile device, the importance of users' perceptions and understanding of cyber security threats has grown substantially. A lack...

The article contextualizes contemporary cyber-surveillance practices in the light of Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive espionage by intelligences services and shows the results of an online survey on the public perceptions of privacy in public telecommunication networks in Slovenia. The results relate to types and frequency of victimization;...

This book tackles the regulatory issues of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) or Remotely-Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS), which have profound consequences for privacy, security and other fundamental liberties. Collectively known as “drones," they were initially deployed for military purposes: reconnaissance, surveillance and extrajudicial executions. Tod...

This chapter outlines the transformations of surveillance in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries occurring as a result of profound economic, social and political change in the post-socialist transition. It begins with the socio-economic framework in which new and historically significant technologically enhanced surveillance practices...

Full-scale political change affects every level of a society, but perhaps nowhere as strikingly as in the areas of crime policy and law enforcement. Over the past two decades, the European nations that have moved from totalitarianism toward democracy have come to embody this trend, yet reliable sources on crime and law enforcement in these countrie...

To an ever-increasing extent, law enforcement agencies work with and rely on information obtained and passed to them by intelligence services. However, in comparison to the police, intelligent services face much less regulation or supervision. Contrasting levels of regulation and supervision pose a problem where the institutional and functional bor...

Cyberbullying usually refers to bullying and harassment of others by means of new electronic technologies, primarily mobile phones and the Internet. The paper presents the results of an on-line cyberbullying victimization survey conducted mostly among students at several Slovene faculties. 441 adults, of whom 246 were aged less than 24 years, 135 a...

The development of microelectronics, databases and computer networks, in connection with an enhanced desire to control through identification, the entertainment culture, the managerial paradigm in public policy, a belief in technical progress, the commercialization of security, a decline of humanistic understanding of the individual and the rise of...

The internet does not have any central, hierarchically established coordinator, able to establish rules of the game from top to bottom. The technical design of the internet has always been technologically resistant to all attempts of control. There was even a widespread belief that the exercise of state sovereignty, resting on the principle of terr...

The introduction of subject into language automatically means a renunciation of violence, since language is an instrument that intervenes as a mediator between people. Conflicts between people are thus entirely ordinary, as are also strategies and techniques of non-violent conflict resolution. Alternative resolution of conflicts, which has attracte...

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