Regional Working Groups

Book Understanding Political Violence now available in Spanish (Transnational Organized Crime )
12.31.09

Vincenzo Ruggiero’s “Understanding Political Violence” (published in English by Open University Press in 2006) is now available in Spanish, with the title: “La violencia política: un análisis criminológico”, published by Anthropos (Barcelona).

This book analyses institutional and anti-institutional political violence, the former as violence from above, the latter as violence from below. An excursus in sociological and criminological thought highlights how the different theoretical schools have discussed this particular form of collective behaviour. From classicism to positivism, from functionalism to conflict theory, through to most recent theoretical contribution, the book also analyses the two extreme forms of political violence, namely terrorism and war.

Publisher's website

Recording, presenters' slides, and polling results from the webinar (Transnational Organized Crime )
12.01.09

The recording, presenters' slides, and polling results from the webinar "Best Practices to Combat Human Trafficking", hosted by the Harvard’s Initiative to Stop Human Trafficking & the Government Innovators Network on November 16th, can be accessed in the Government Innovators Network website through this link.

You must first register with the site to access this page (which is free and takes only a few seconds).

Latin-Americans to debate on the relationships between police forces and youth (Crime Prevention)
11.11.09

From this Wednesday, the Regional Conference on Police and Youth will take place in Nicaragua’s capital, Managua. On this occasion, the Latin-American Network of Police and Civil Society will present the results of a research on the mechanisms for youth crime prevention used by police forces in the region.

More information here (in Spanish).

Workshop on Crime Prevention (Crime Prevention)
10.21.09

This workshop is the first international activity of the GCST's Working Group on Prevention of Crime and community Participation. It will take effect in the city of Santiago de Chile from October 21-22 and the main goal is to present and analyze the first steps for the working agenda Work for carrying out mechanisms and institutionalization processes for crime prevention in different regional contexts. Experts from different regions of the globe will attend this meeting, which is organized by Flacso-Chile.

TRANSCRIME report on extortion now available in our library (Transnational Organized Crime )
09.21.09

TRANSCRIME, a joint research centre of the Università degli Studi di Trento and the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore lead by professor Ernesto Ugo Savona – who is also a member of the GCST’s Working Group on Organized Crime – presents the report untitled Study on Extortion Racketeering: the Need for an Instrument to Combat Activities of Organised Crime.

This document was presented by professor Savona to the Working Group on Organized Crime during its first meeting, which took place in Mexico City in August 19th and 20th.

The report is available in our online library under the Organized Crime category and can be downloaded here.

(Privatization)
01.31.08

University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA 31 January – 2 February 2008.

Titled The Privatization of Security and Human Rights in the Americas: Perspectives from the Global South, this conference sought to assess the consequences of the proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in the Western Hemisphere, and to consider the options available for effective regulation. The event brought together notable academics, civil society actors in the region and UN staff and examined the impacts of the privatisation of security on human rights, human security and democratic governance in the region.

A crucial objective of this conference was that it sought to launch a regional network of researchers on PMSCs and Human Security in the Western Hemisphere. The main task of the network was to develop and formalise a research agenda on the subject in the region. The conference also established a series of annual meetings on the subject to facilitate the realisation of the research agenda.
This initiative is significant for represent

ng the deliberate effort to bring together scholars and other relevant actors from both the North and the South of the Americas to discuss the varying effects of PMSCs in each of the different contexts. It was also significant for bringing together academic and non-academic participants, and was therefore able to draw upon the combined advantage of empirical, theoretical, and applied perspectives as reflected in the blend of papers presented.

For more about the conference and the papers presented, please visit this link.