How Outlaws Win Friends And Influence People

This book asks a critical question for our times: why do an increasing number of people support, admire and aspire to be outlaws? Outlaw motorcycle clubs have grown, spread and matured. Popular culture glamorizes them; law enforcement agencies fight them and the media vilify them. Meanwhile, the outlaw bikers exploit the current cultural and economic climate to attract new members. How Outlaws Win Friends and Influence People argues that the growth of these anti-establishment groups under neoliberalism is not coincidental, but inevitable. The book asks a critical question for our times: why do people today, in increasing numbers, support, admire and aspire to be outlaws? What needs and desires do the clubs satisfy? How do they win support and influence? Answering this is crucial if we are to successfully fight the social harms caused by these groups, as well as the harms that underlie their proliferation. Unless we understand the cultural dynamic at play here, our fight against these organizations will always take the form of a battle against the mythological Hydra: when one head is cut off, two more grow. “Tereza Kuldova is a rebel with a cause - her new book is a razor-sharp critique of stereotypical conceptions of the ‘outlaw biker’ and provides refreshing insights into their subjective life-worlds”​ - Daniel Briggs, author of the award-winning Dead-End Lives.

This book is the first to compare the shared cultural tenets of ancient warbands and outlaw biker gangs. It argues that the values of hyper-masculinity can be traced from the former into the contemporary environment of the latter: codes of honour, loyalty and bravery have prioritised small groups of males over women and other men, creating a history of hyper-masculinity that shows little sign of stopping. Indeed, Outlaw Bikers and Ancient Warbands: Hyper-Masculinity and Cultural Continuity argues that such hyper-masculine culture can be found in many male groups such as the police, military and sports, and that if we want to understand hyper-masculinity and face it as a society then we need to recognize that outlaw bikers are a reflection of behavior that has a very long tradition. This pioneering work explores these issues from ancient times and into the future.

The first of its kind, The Handbook of Collective Violence covers a range of contexts in which collective violence occurs, bringing together international perspectives from psychology, criminology and sociology into one complete volume. There have been significant advances made in the last 25 years regarding how collective violence is conceptualised and understood, with a move away from focusing on solely individual forms of violence toward examining and understanding violence that can occur within groups. This handbook presents some of the most interesting topics within the area of collective violence, drawing upon international expertise and including some of the most well-known academics and practitioners of our generation. Structured into four parts: understanding war; terrorism; public order and organized violent crime; and gang and multiple offender groups, this volume provides academics and practitioners with an up-to-date resource that covers core areas of interest and application. Accessibly written, it is ideal for both academics and policymakers alike, capturing developments in the field and offering a deep theoretical insight to enhance our understanding of how such collective violence evolves, alongside practical suggestions for management, prevention and intervention.

The world has been bombarded in recent years with images of the luxurious lives and wealth of corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats, amassed at the expense of ordinary people. Such images exploit our feelings of injustice, are taken as indicative of moral decay, and inspire a desire to purge our economies of dirty money, objects, and people. But why do anti-corruption efforts routinely fail? What kind of world are they creating? Looking at luxury art, antiquities, superyachts, and populist politics, this book explores the connection between luxury and corruption, and offers an alternative to the received wisdom of how we tackle corruption.

This is the first book to examine the growth and phenomenon of a securitized and criminalized compliance society which relies increasingly on intelligence-led and predictive technologies to control future risks, crimes, and security threats. It articulates the emergence of a ‘compliance-industrial complex’ that synthesizes regulatory capitalism and surveillance capitalism to impose new regimes of power and control, as well as new forms of subjectivity subservient to the ‘operating system’ of a pre-crime society. Looking at compliance beyond frameworks of business management, corporate governance, law, and accounting, it looks as it as a social phenomenon, instrumental in the pluralization and privatization of policing, where the private intelligence, private security, and big tech companies are being concentrated at the very core of compliance, and hence, governance of the social. The critical book draws on transversal, rather than interdisciplinary, approaches and integrates disparate perspectives, inspired by works in critical criminology, critical algorithm studies, critical management studies, as well as social anthropology and philosophy.

This book offers a collection of cutting-edge essays on the relationship between crime, harm and consumer culture. Although consumer culture has been addressed across the social sciences, it has yet to be fully explored in criminology. The editors bring together an impressive list of authors with original ideas and a fresh perspective to this field. The collection first introduces the reader to three sets of ideas which will be especially useful to students and researchers piecing together theoretical frameworks for their studies. New concepts such as pseudo-pacification, the materialist libertine and the commodification of abstinence can be used as foundation stones for new explanatory criminological analyses in the 21st century. The collection then moves on to present case studies based on rigorous empirical work in the fields of consumption and debt, ‘outlaw’ gangs, illegal drug markets, gambling, the mentality that drives investment fraudsters and the relationship between social media and state surveillance. These case studies showcase the strength of the research skills and knowledge these scholars offer to the field of criminology. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the effects of consumer culture in modern society.

The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillance as well as the asymmetries within populations and divides in health outcomes between the Global North and Global South. Indeed, societies that have experienced the horrors of settler colonialism have already survived apocalypses. COVID-19 serves then as a premonition for our climate emergency as well as an echo of other apocalyptic situations, both real and imagined. This book consists of essays from acclaimed theorists and scholars writing amid the pandemic and exposes the asymmetries of our divided world. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of literature, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and comparative literature including post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing and are accompanied by a new afterword.