Vincenzo Ruggiero

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Middlesex University

The ongoing war in Yemen, which has already displaced millions of people, possesses some typical traits that suggest its inclusion among the deadly conflicts known as ‘civil wars’. This chapter will review briefly the components that characterize these types of conflicts and, after providing a summary of recent events, will attempt to identify the...

Responding to growing demand for interpretation and analysis of re-emerging social conflicts in the developed, as well as the developing world, this timely collection is the outcome of the recent boost received by social movement studies since the spread of contention and collective action at international level and the growth of the 'anti-globaliz...

Critics of market economies are found among academics, social movements and alliances involving both. One such alliance is constituted by what is known as the degrowth movement, whose analyses of the dysfunctional effects of prevalent economic arrangements and principles relate (implicitly or explicitly) to crime prevention strategies. After briefl...

What survives of the notions, principles and values of critical criminology? Faced with contexts that could not be more dramatically different from those fostering critical approaches to crime and its control, what is left of the radical theories and practical initiatives that characterised it in the 1970s? This article does not offer a history of...

The ongoing war in Yemen, which has already displaced millions of people, possesses some typical traits that suggest its inclusion among the deadly conflicts known as “civil wars.” This article will review briefly the components that characterize these types of conflicts and, after providing a summary of recent events, will attempt to identify the...

This paper provides an analytical summary of the findings of a research project into the activities, the causes of, and responses to, organized crime and terrorism. Based on the views of front-line practitioners such as social workers, teachers, law enforcers and other experts, the paper examines their needs, interpretations, uncertainties and pers...

Tax havens offer services to a variety of individuals and groups engaged in distinct operations, namely tax avoidance, tax evasion and money laundering. This entry examines the different beneficiaries of tax havens.

This article proposes an understanding of war and criminology through the use of the creative sources offered by literature. These sources, while communicating exemplary meanings and morals, can help describe and comprehend the social and cultural landscapes of war and crime. Stendhal and Tolstoy are chosen as classical major providers of such sour...

[full article, abstract in English; only abstract in Lithuanian] This paper offers a typology of different forms of political violence, linking them in a continuum and in an interdependent field of forces. The forms identified are systemic violence, institutional violence, group violence, armed struggle, terrorism and war. In the final section, af...

Cuando se asoman al campo de la criminología, los economistas suelen estudiar la lógica racional de las infracciones. Sus análisis de la actividad delictiva presuponen que debería tratarse a los infractores como a cualquier otro decisor racional. En Los crímenes de la economía, Vincenzo Ruggiero invierte esa perspectiva mediante la revisión crimino...

Terrorist organisations may complement their military capability with functioning infrastructures and profitable activity in economic ventures as well as in crime. This leads many commentators to focus on the increasing overlap between terrorism and crime, including and particularly organised crime. The present paper is devoted to the analysis of t...

The idea of democracy is being championed across the world, with some fifty new countries embracing this type of political system between 1974 and 2011 (Freedom House Anxious dictators, wavering democracies: global freedom under pressure, Freedom House, Washington, 2016). Simultaneously, however, dissatisfaction has grown due to the perceived incap...

A summary of the book 'Dirty Money: On Financial Delinquency', Oxford University Press, 2017

This chapter suggests that contemporary wars require the de-civilization of those who invade and those who are invaded. Today, international affairs are conducted by small enclaves of decision-makers formed of lobbyists, business people, politicians, pundits, and individuals who are or have been all of this simultaneously. War, which is the most pr...

The premise of this article is that financial crises, whether they occur as a result of legitimate of illegitimate conduct, cause social harm and victimisation. The 2008 bank crisis is a clear indication of this, as some of the financial operations determining it possessed a criminal nature while some did not. This article is concerned with both ty...

Abolitionism is not only a strategy or a set of demands aimed at the reduction (or suppression) of custody, it is also a perspective, a philosophy, an approach. This is exactly what makes it relevant today. Penal abolitionism challenges conventional definitions of crime and the law, while defying official views of the meanings and effects of punish...

Paul Nizan (1905–1940) is also known in France as the ‘impossible communist’, for his long-term allegiance to the Party and the abrupt cancellation of his membership, in the late 1930s, following the Nazi–Soviet pact. This paper discusses a number of his writings, focusing particularly on his best known novel, The Conspiracy, where a revolutionary...

Financial crime is a large area of political and social enquiry and includes a variety of illicit conducts that need to be isolated and addressed as discrete offences. Financial operations, however, may cause harm even when they do not possess a criminal nature, as events relating to the 2008 bank crisis have shown. This paper is concerned with bot...

This paper proposes a journey through some of the many novels written by Honoré de Balzac, through the mythic constitution of his world, his epic, which summons up the same recurrent circle of figures: his “human comedy” will offer surprising insights for a better understanding of the crimes of the powerful.

The ethical dimension adds a key tool for the analysis of the crimes of the powerful. This dimension is introduced in the analysis of the present article, which seeks to establish how offenders endowed with resources and power justify their conduct through a selective interpretation of classical Western philosophy and by adhering to some aspects of...

This book provides an analysis of the two concepts of power and crime and posits that criminologists can learn more about these concepts by incorporating ideas from disciplines outside of criminology. Although arguably a 'rendezvous' discipline, Vincenzo Ruggiero argues that criminology can gain much insight from other fields such as the political...

The environment has been among the theoretical and practical concerns of criminology for many years, but it could be argued that such concerns have long been ‘indirect’ in nature.1 The real criminological object of study in past decades was how organized and white-collar individuals operated in illicit businesses that had an environmental impact —...

This article interrogates the relationship between the Italian island of Lampedusa and trans-Mediterranean migration. It explores how the construction of Lampedusa as a border zone has been implicated in the rise and fall in numbers of migrants reaching the island's shores over the last two decades. It proceeds to consider the appropriateness of in...

When Cesare Beccaria called for an end to institutional barbarianism, invoking humanity in the treatment of offenders, he implicitly warned governments that, without the reform of penal systems, dangerous forms of “sedition” would soon arise. A few years after this warning, the French Revolution and its “excesses” proved how prophetic Beccaria’s ca...

This paper uses examples from the history and practices of multi-national and large companies in the oil, chemical and asbestos industries to examine their legal and illegal despoiling and destruction of the environment and impact on human and non-human life. The discussion draws on the literature on green criminology and state-corporate crime and...

This paper describes several key developments and dimensions in the field of ‘green criminology’ and discusses some of the relevant debates and controversies arising. It then outlines overlaps and connections with other areas of work within critical criminology. The central focus of the paper is on crimes of the economy as they affect the environme...

Classical utopian works have never exhausted the strength of their message, and have frequently been re-elaborated by libertarian thinkers. This article discusses the differences between classical and contemporary libertarian utopias in relation to crime and punishment. Special attention is given to the abolitionist school of thought.

Economists have often paid visits to the field of criminology, examining the rational logic of offending. When economists examine criminal activity, they imply that offenders should be treated like any other social actor making rational choices.

Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis are classical utopian works that have not exhausted their humanistic, polemical message. Still the object of political and philosophical exegesis, they describe ideal social arrangements and include observations on crime and punishment, establishing a long tradition of critical thinking in...

There are some commonalities and divergences in the penal systems of the countries examined in this volume, and attempts to explicate both are fraught with difficulties.

A variety of opinions and observations about public sociology are reviewed in this paper, which then examines how criminology (as a branch of sociology) has reacted to the call to 'go public'. Dilemmas, potential strengths and manifest weaknesses are brought to light. These, it will be argued, are mostly due to the peculiar disciplinary position of...

In Corruption and Organised Crime in Europe, Gounev and Ruggiero present a discussion of the relation between organized criminals and corruption in the EU's 27 Member States. The book draws on research and scholarly work the editors carried out, respectively, within the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) in Bulgaria, and within academic instit...

Vincenzo Ruggiero questions the centrality of Wacquant's account of the symbolic functions of punishment and argues that what is feared about the poor is less their criminal capacity than their indolence. The claim is that it is not primarily a question of the criminality of the poor that leads to their criminalisation but their implicit challenge...

Penal abolitionism is known for its unconventional analysis of crime, the law and punishment. Some critical views of restorative justice emerge when the alternatives to imprisonment advocated by abolitionists are examined. This paper discusses such views, highlighting their critique of professionalism and their emphasis on community conflict regula...

The possibility of commercially exploiting plant, animal and human genetic resources unlocked by biotechnology has given rise to a wide range of cultural, environmental, ethical and economic conflicts. While supporters describe this activity as bioprospecting, critics refer to it as biopiracy. According to this latter view, international legal agre...

As a contribution to literature drawing together green criminology and studies of organised and corporate crime, this paper provides a case study of crimes and public health harms linked to the Naples garbage disposal crisis. The context is the inability of modern consumer society to cope with the problem of mass production of waste. In turn this l...

This research note focuses on the relationship between organised crime and corruption in Italy. It is part of a wider research project investigating that relationship across a number of European countries. In the first part of this contribution, along with a brief account of definitional issues, a summary review of previous work on the connections...

Repeated calls to criminologists to engage in the analysis of violent political conflict have been followed by an abundant production of literature within the discipline. This article examines such production and attempts to delineate the limits to criminology in the analysis of political violence. By presenting interview extracts from a case study...

The history of international efforts to control the flow of funds to designated 'terrorist groups' via the formal financial system is examined. The work shows that—despite the high motivation of some governments and international banks to reduce terrorist attacks, which harm their citizens, customers, staff and profits—it remains difficult to deter...

Social disorder is constructed in particular ways around certain groups, and widely used to serve certain particular interests. It may contribute to mobilizing despair as a political weapon rather than demands for justice. Appropriated by powerful groups, and turned into fear, it reflects, reshapes and reinforces the status quo (Shirlow and Pain, 2...

There is growing body of literature which offers reviews of the concepts of organised crime and political vio-lence, while documenting the official efforts to address such concepts jointly and treat them as a single issue. It would be intriguing to investigate how members of organised criminal groups and violent political groups re-spectively react...

As a necessary premise to this contribution, it should be borne in mind that debates around ‘race’, in Italy, would be deemed racist. Likewise, ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ are not important social categories in official crime statistics where crime and victimisation rates are generally classified, first, along the lines of two broad groups of Italian res...

The author considers some of the works produced by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who from different perspectives discuss notions such as transgression, deviance and crime. It is argued that the analysis of power crime may immensely benefit from an excavation into economics, for its concern about the creation and acquisition of wealth, the legiti...

Social and institutional alarm around crime and violence within South-Asian communities in the UK has grown substantially over the last 10years. Whether based on imagined threats and moral panics or on realistic observation of facts, such alarm focuses on drug use, related property crime, gang violence, and ultimately on new forms of organised crim...

Criminological analysis of corruption is rare, perhaps because this type of offending is regarded as a victimless behaviour. The author analyses political corruption in Italy with a view to identifying the social damage caused by it. Aspects of victimisation are mainly found within the domain of civil and political rights. The author examines the e...

In some Italian cities passers-by are offered - along with the local equivalent of the ‘Big Issue’ publications whose titles would vaguely translate as ‘The Joint’, ‘The Fix’, ‘The Stuff’, ‘Syringes’. While in some European countries drug use tends to be concealed as an embarrassing sign of individual failure, in Italy some drug users display their...

This paper examines the structure and modus operandi of South Asian criminal organisations operating in the UK. It is based on empirical research conducted between 2005 and 2006 among prisoners sentenced for drug offences, a number of drug distributors operating in the market, and observers with a knowledge of the drugs business working for the pol...

The debate around the criminality of white-collar crime is far from exhausted, leaving one wondering whether Sutherland (1945), when asking ‘is white-collar crime crime?’ intended to pose a mere rhetorical question and enjoy the interminable debate and controversies such a question was bound to generate. After providing a review of the major argume...

In patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a focal distribution of loss of aeration in lung computed tomography predicts low potential for alveolar recruitment and susceptibility to alveolar hyperinflation with high levels of positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP). We tested the hypothesis that, in this cohort of patients, the ta...

To investigate release of some inflammatory cytokines (Cys) after coronary angioplasty and its links with coronary atherosclerosis. Twenty-seven consecutive subjects with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) were enrolled in the study: serial blood samples were taken in order to evaluate plasma concen...

The millions of deaths produced by states and governments make the 20th century ‘unnameable’, a century far more lethal than all previous ‘pre-civil’ epochs. It does not appear that contemporary state violence tends to decline or to temper the brutality commonly attributed to archaic armies, nor that the rules and limitations internationally impose...

This paper explores the spread of drug use within British South Asian communities, focusing on the role of family, friendship and ethnicity connections for members of drug dealing network. The paper draws on qualitative research conducted in England and Wales, but also in Pakistan. Interviews were conducted with 123 individuals, including: British...