Transnational Crime, Crime Control and Security

The book examines 'the globalisation of local policing' through an ethnographic study of the Danish Police. Where many studies are looking into how larger inter- or transnational policing bodies and policies are changing the world of policing, few have gauged how local, public police forces are also globalizing. This book provides some unique insights into this under-researched process. Specifically, it describes the daily practices and perceptions of two Danish detective task forces, tasked with the investigation of organized property crimes committed by foreign nationals. In the book, readers get to see how the detectives think and work, including the many efforts they make in attuning their daily work to a more global reality. More so, readers get to see how the detectives fail and the many frustrations and concerns that such changes include. One the one hand, Danish detectives very much understand the need to de-localize and develop their work. On the other hand, they feel that many of these changes are in conflict with what they find to be real and rewarding police work. For people interested in contemporary issues of policing, the book thus points to a puzzling paradox. Globalisation might be making for more mobile and even mobilised local forces, more technologically driven and collaborating with international partners. However, these very processes are also making local officers feel more disarmed than ever. Ultimately, the book describes why that is, its consequences, as well as how to imagine a form of global policing more in tune with its local actors.

The phenomenon of child trafficking holds a unique position as an issue of significant contemporary relevance, occupying a principal place in debates about human rights today. The interchangeable terms trafficking and modern slavery evoke emotive responses and proclamations about abolition of contemporary ills, viewed as the ultimate aberration when a child is involved. The classification of children under legal frameworks marks them as different, as ‘other’ and in the context of laws implemented to address trafficking, slavery, and children on the move more generally this distinction is complicated. 

This book charts the emergence, decline and re-emergence of child trafficking law and policy during the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries. Through providing a systematic and comprehensive overview of the historical origins of child trafficking by utilising the wealth of information located within the non-digitised archives of the League of Nations. It focusses upon the Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children to engage with League of Nations policy and to provide an insightful and original contribution to the current body of literature. This is a book that seeks to critique the entanglements of children’s rights and colonialism in relation to the mobility and exploitation of children. Centralising the legacy of colonialism, the undercurrents of race, white supremacy, patriarchy, and their ongoing influence upon contemporary anti-trafficking legal and policy responses. Through utilizing what the author identifies as the ‘anti-trafficking machine’ as a theoretical framework, the book challenges contemporary law and policy responses to child trafficking. This theoretical framework has been adopted to illustrate a central hypothesis of the book – that the contemporary anti-trafficking agenda is both imperialist and a continuity of colonial attitudes.