This paper focuses on how organized crime in Bulgaria uses political corruption to achieve its goals. It focuses, though, on one specific type of criminal structures, the ones controlled by former security officers. More specifically it analyzes the criminal careers of two well known Bulgarian crime figures and former security officers. The way they use the instrument of corruption changes though the years when they evolve from relatively unimportant racketeers into powerful local oligarchs.

In the nineteenth century in the Netherlands, tramps and beggars were sent to Veenhuizen to work there as a form of punishment and rehabilitation. To investigate the background of these banished men, the authors drew a systematic 5% sample out of 6.000 men who were banished between 1896-1901. Using information from the so-called ‘signalements’-cards that were compiled, the authors found that the Veenhuizen men were not uneducated, unskilled workers, but on the contrary, often had some kind of (semi-)skilled profession. Many did not have a permanent abode, and only a few had (ever) been married. At on average 45 years of age, the Veenhuizen convicts were old for the era they lived in. As such these men lacked and had probably at some point in their lives lost societal as well as social ties, and had gone adrift.
Recidivism was high. While the Veenhuizen measure may have been effective in delivering society from the blemishes that these men represented, but in general it didn't turn these men into fully participating citizens.

How to understand the disintegration of the Dutch Caribbean? The Kingdom of the Netherlands comprising three countries - the Netherlands, the Netherlands Antilles, and Aruba - will be reordered. The Netherlands Antilles will cease to exist as a separate country. Curaçao and Sint Maarten will acquire country status within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, just as Aruba did in 1986, though theirs will be of a different status and with less autonomy. The islands Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, the so-called BES islands, will be integrated into the Netherlands as public authorities (openbare lichamen); as such the BES islands will be administered by the Netherlands while retaining local government functions (just as municipalities in the Netherlands).
This article outlines the history behind these changes and the factors that are at play. However improbable the Dutch Caribbean hypothesis, the Kingdom facilitates a connection of these islands with the international world. Against all odds and populist opponents, the Dutch Caribbean is a challenge to square the circle, a complex pact, impossible to balance, which will never come to a definitive conclusion.

This article discusses what is left aside in the perspective of nodal governance: namely the adaptability and dynamics of social reality itself. The challenge is to research ‘what actually happens’ without reducing it to collective structures or specific frameworks in advance. Previous to specific structures (‘teams’) and frameworks (‘meetings’, ‘contracts’) there is constant change, movement and difference. By using the work of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) the authors research how the nodes police, insurers and loss adjusters cooperate in the fight against transport criminality and how interactions between these nodes take content and shape. Consequently, their cooperation is not interpreted as a static theme, but rather as a dynamic process that requires constant interpretation in terms of relationships, unexpected events, adaptations and coincidences. On the basis of fifteen in-depth interviews the authors show in which way a ‘new language’ with ‘new mechanisms’ originates within the cooperation. As a consequence, ‘informal contacts’, ‘goals and interests’, ‘mutual confidence’ and ‘information-exchange’, which play an important role between the nodes, are constantly re-defined.

This paper advances a ‘nodal governance’ perspective, which understands the delivery of security as being accomplished through the thinking and practices of various ‘nodes’ or entities characterized by ways of thinking about problems and influencing events. In this light, policing should be understood sociologically as involving the activities of state and non-state entities (e.g. corporations and well-resourced communities) as well as the public police. The authors argue that it is essential for police to recognize the nodal world within which they live and to locate themselves within ‘nodal assemblages’ for the delivery of security. As illustrations, the paper discusses two practical projects devoted to exploring nodal security governance arrangements in the country contexts of South Africa and Australia. The authors add that the question of what precisely nodal policing can or should look like in concrete terms is an empirical matter to be resolved within site-specific contexts.

In recent years it has become popular in political discourse and academic literature to talk about the blurring boundaries between transnational terrorism and organized crime. In addition, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 have instigated a debate on the link between transnational terrorism and state failure. This article scrutinizes this so-called ‘black hole’ thesis and its relationship to the crime-terror nexus by addressing the political significance of such conceptual blurring within an international context that is increasingly characterized by uncertainty and uncontrollable risks.

Traditionally there was a lot of admiration in Russia for the social bandits in the sixteenth en seventeenth centuries. Later, under the Soviets, other brave political bandits, better known as revolutionaries, were praised. In addition, there were vory v zakone and the prisoners of Gulag. In this article the link between politics and crime in the Soviet and post-Soviet Russia is analyzed. In order to understand the emergence of old and new criminals it is necessary to follow the historical development of this interrelationship.

The upsurge in the use of economic sanctions in the post-Cold War era has prompted much scholarly and policy debate over their effectiveness and humanitarian consequences. Remarkably little attention, however, has been devoted to their criminalizing consequences and legacy for the post-sanctions period. In this article, the author develops an analytical framework identifying and categorizing the potential criminalizing effects of sanctions across place (within and around the targeted country) and time (during and after the sanctions period). This framework is applied and evaluated through an in-depth examination of the case of Yugoslavia. For comparative leverage and to assess the applicability of the argument beyond the Yugoslavia case, the analysis is briefly extended to Croatia. The article suggests that sanctions can unintentionally contribute to the criminalization of the state, economy, and civil society of both the targeted country and its immediate neighbors, fostering a symbiosis between political leaders, organized crime, and transnational smuggling networks. This symbiosis, in turn, can persist beyond the lifting of sanctions, contributing to corruption and crime and undermining the rule of law.

This article describes the relation between the murder on the Walloon social-democratic politician André Cools on 18^th July 1991 at Liege and the corruption case Agusta - dealing with the purchase of army helicopters - in order to reflect on typical Belgian criminological issues in this political organized crime topic. The murder committed by Tunisian hit-men was ordered through the influence of the personal cabinet of Van der Biest, a former minister. During the murder investigation a link with the Agusta corruption case was discovered and would tear down several ministers as well as the former NATO Secretary-General Willy Claes. Due to the existence of especially journalistic sources and a lack of scientific criminological material, the conclusions of this article are strictly personal. The murder and the corruption prove the fact that political organized crime was a reality in Belgium. This case can stand as a scholarly example in the study of political organized crime in Belgium.

The subjects fraud and corruption play an important role in the recent debate on the constitutional changes within the Netherlands Antilles and the ‘status aparte’ of Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The Netherlands and the various islands keep passing the blame on one another when it comes to fraud and corruption. It seems there is little willingness to look at the underlying causes or to express self-criticism. In this article an attempt is made to outline what is really going on in the field of fraud and corruption in the Caribbean part of the Kingdom. Several investigations on fraud and corruption committed by politicians in the past fifteen years will be addressed. Furthermore several socio-cultural, political and economic factors that play a role in causing fraud and corruption are being discussed. In this way the author hopes to contribute to a more constructive debate about the issue of fraud and corruption.