Illicit Flows and Criminal Things

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 labelled "illegal" move across regulatory spaces. Willem van Schendel is Professor of Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam. His books include The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia; Time Matters: Global and Local Time in Asian Societies (co-edited); and Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World (co-edited) Itty Abraham is Program Director at the Social Science Research Council and Co-Director of the Program in Global Security and Cooperation He is author of The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State and co-editor of Southeast Asian Diasporas.