The New Mafia: Vladimir Putin's Inner Circle and Russian Organized Crime

The purpose of this project was to show the relationship between organized crime and members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle and the impact of the crossover of organized crime tactics and behavior to officials of the Russian government. To show this, this thesis looks at the ways in which four specific members of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, Igor Sechin, Sergei Glazyev, Viktor Zolotov, and Nikolai Patrushev, are involved in illegal activity that resembles the kind of actions that are perpetrated by organized crime groups and how their behavior is similar to that of the leaders of these groups. This thesis aims to reveal the extent of the “mafia state” and show the depth of corruption

Do MDGs Matter? India's Development Trajectory in the 21st Century

Current discourse on post?2015 development goals needs to be situated in the context of the influence of MDGs in shaping national policies and programmes. In this article, India's development trajectory and its impacts are critically analysed to demonstrate the near absence of influence of MDGs discourse on Indian development planning or outcomes. The analysis also focuses on the political economy of India's development trajectory and identifies absence of governance reforms as the key deficit in meaningful impacts on the lives of people in India. In sharp contrast to the High Level Panel's recommendations on post?2015, the author proposes an alternative set of goals focusing on reforming governance in India

Proceedings of the workshop on women and international migration-opportunities and challenges (13 December 2012, organised by India Centre for Migration (ICM))

CARIM-India: Developing a knowledge base for policymaking on India-EU migrationInternational migration of women was identified as an issue of significance for both India and EU in the light of feminisation of labour markets and migration streams. The present workshop is a part of the activity of training sessions under the project on “Developing a knowledge base for policymaking on India-EU Migration”, co-funded by the EU with the objective of securing concrete and direct interaction between Indian and European Union stakeholders on migration and mobility. ICM has organised this workshop to disseminate and circulate information on an issue of importance in contemporary time to all the relevant stakeholders.CARIM-India is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Unio

PKP’s properties in small towns in Lodzkie Voivodeship

PKP S.A. manages over 100 thousand properties. As a result of socio-economic changes, technological advances etc., many of these properties have become useless from the viewpoint of the activity carried out by the PKP. Apart from using PKP’s properties for the organization of rail transport, some of them can be used for housing purposes or for commercial and investment purposes. The aim of this article are to identify PKP’s possessions in small towns in Lodzkie Voivodeship and to evaluate their investment attractiveness (for activities not related to railway transport).PKP S.A. posiada w zarządzaniu ponad 100 tys. nieruchomości. W wyniku zmian społeczno-gospodarczych, postępu technologicznego, wiele z tych nieruchomości stało się zbędnych z punktu widzenia działalności prowadzonej przez PKP. Poza użytkowaniem nieruchomości PKP na potrzeby organizacji transportu kolejowego, część z nich może być wykorzystana na cele mieszkaniowe lub komercyjne i inwestycyjne. Celem artykułu jest identyfikacja gruntów należących do PKP S.A. w małych miastach województwa łódzkiego oraz ocena ich atrakcyjności inwestycyjnej dla potrzeb działalności niezwiązanej z transportem kolejowym

Electoral goals and center-state transfers : a theoretical model and empirical evidence from India

We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not. A testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers. We test this prediction using Indian data for 14 states from 1974–75 to 1996–97. We find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16% higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non-swing

The Racialized History of Vice Policing

Vice policing targets the consumption and commercialization of certain pleasures that have been criminalized in the United States—such as the purchase of narcotics and sexual services. One might assume that vice policing is concerned with eliminating these vices. However, in reality, this form of policing has not been centered on protecting and preserving the moral integrity of the policed communities by eradicating vice. Instead, the history of vice policing provides an example of the racialized nature of policing in the United States. Vice policing has been focused on (1) maintaining racial segregation, (2) containing vice in marginalized communities, and (3) facilitating the surveillance of these communities. This Article adopts an abolitionist methodology to evaluate vice policing and introduces three principles that animate abolitionist organizing and thought: the principles of legacy, futility, and possibility. This Article introduces this framework for understanding abolition, which will be more deeply examined in future work. It applies two of these principles—legacy and futility—to evaluate the racialized history of vice policing in the United States. The first principle, legacy, invites us to center an institution’s history in the maintenance of white supremacy when evaluating that institution’s continued existence in modern society. The second principle, futility, encourages us to abandon futile attempts to resuscitate morally bankrupt institutions. This Article applies the legacy and futility principles to demonstrate how the very core of vice policing is about maintaining white supremacy. In many cities in the United States, police deliberately pushed vice into racially segregated Black neighborhoods and contributed to a geography of vice that reinforced the racial hierarchy. This policing protected property interests in white neighborhoods while allowing vice to continue to exist within these cities. Vice policing maintained the property interests of white communities by ensuring their property values did not decrease because of visible, and impossible to fully eradicate, crimes. As such, the policing of vice was a mechanism for maintaining racial segregation and preserving white property. It was a form of redline policing. Liberals who critique police and prison abolition as too radical often ignore this history (or are unfamiliar with it). While these liberal reformers believe we should preserve the good parts of policing, this Article argues that racialized vice policing has left very little good to preserve. In other words, the bad parts of vice policing are core to the way policing occurs and are part of its legacy (and present). This Article illustrates how this policing was critical to creating and then maintaining Black communities as sites of vice and visible crime. Given this history, the abolitionist demand to abandon futile efforts to reform violent institutions invites us to take this history seriously and look beyond police to address community harm in this area

On Beauty and Policing

“To protect and serve” is the motto of police departments from Los Angeles to Cape Town. When police officers deviate from the twin goals of protection and service, for example by using excessive force or by maintaining hostile relations with the community, scholars recommend more training, more oversight, or more resources in policing. However, police appear to be motivated by a superseding goal in the area of sex work policing. In some places, the policing of sex workers is connected to police officers’ perceptions of beauty, producing a hierarchy of desirable bodies as enforced by those sworn to protect and serve us all. This Article examines how police preserve racial and gender subordination in South Africa, an instructive analog for the United States because of both nations’ shared histories of racial apartheid and valorization of whiteness. Drawing from extensive original data from a multiyear study, this Article exposes how police officers’ perceptions about sex workers’ beauty influenced their policing of different classes of sex workers in Johannesburg, South Africa. Police valuations about sex workers’ beauty resulted in benevolent surveillance of sex workers who were higher on the social hierarchy and decreased police protection for sex workers whom they viewed as less beautiful in more dangerous areas of the community. If community protection and service were the primary motivators for police conduct, police officers should have focused on the spaces that were more dangerous, which were those with sex workers police deemed less professionalized and less beautiful. This act of assigning value to different bodies, through the subjective language of aesthetics and beauty, reinforced existing racial and sexual hierarchies. Beauty was a proxy for race. Police assigned higher values to whiter and more European bodies, and discounted blacker bodies as foreign and less beautiful. So blacker bodies, which were less valuable than whiter bodies in their eyes, were simultaneously neglected yet susceptible to more brutal forms of policing during their limited interactions with police. Whiter feminine bodies were both well-protected and subject to the constant gaze of the police. These whiter bodies were ignored when they challenged white masculinity, but prioritized over blacker bodies. Reinforcing the higher value of whiter bodies over blacker bodies took precedence over reducing crime, suggesting that police serve and protect racial hierarchies in countries that have a history of white supremacy before they serve and protect the people

Teachers Attitudes Toward Co-teaching in Elementary Reading Classrooms

Co-teaching occurs when a special and general education teacher instructs a classroom of students with and without disabilities through modifications to the core curriculum. The author wrote this paper to evaluate teacher attitudes toward co-teaching in elementary reading classrooms. During co-teaching, educators face several disadvantages such as lack of professional development, absence of co-planning, disagreements among modifications within the curriculum, and confusion with co-teaching approaches. The research within this paper describes the attitudes, issues, and strategies that educators experience through inclusive, co-taught elementary classrooms within the reading curriculum