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The purpose of this paper is to examine key factors responsible for unwillingness of Russian respondents to contact police in life-threatening situations.

The paper is based on a survey data (n=5,088) collected during 1998-2007 in Volgograd, Russia. The multivariate regression is employed for data analysis.

Findings of this study suggest that pervasive public distrust and dissatisfaction of police institution coupled with fear of police abuse and negative previous experiences with crime reporting are responsible for citizens’ unwillingness to contact Russian police.

The findings imply that both instrumental and normative approaches to the police legitimacy are useful when explaining the issues of public-police cooperation in Russia.

Paper also has practical implications pertinent to the 2011 police reform in Russia.

The study also provides an original empirical research in previously under-research area of public-police cooperation in Russia and advances the understanding of Russian police by using the process-based model of policing.

The fight against corruption, which undermines the efficiency of the state apparatus and public confidence in public institutions, remains one of the critical present-day tasks. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to identify the available possibilities and real practice of law enforcement of the norms on investigative prevention, the practical significance of this institution and its potential.

The study investigated theoretical materials on criminological prevention, legislative norms and available law enforcement practice.

It was discovered that, in general, the available statutory regulation is insufficient for the full-fledged practical implementation of the potential of investigative prevention. An exception is specialised prevention, assigned as one of the main tasks to the Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan for Combating Corruption. Proposals have been formulated to improve anti-corruption investigative prevention in other bodies of pre-trial investigation, considering the identified risks.

The uniqueness of the situation lies in the fact that the existence of the institution of investigative prevention, in fact, is limited to the post-Soviet space. The elimination of formalism in the approach to this method of crime prevention can contribute to greater efficiency in the fight against crime, including corruption.

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

This paper aims, through the specific example of the plenipotentiary envoys – a.k.a. the polpredy, at questioning Law as a legitimate knowledge of the political elite in post-Soviet Russia. The term legitimate has to be understood as both a legitimated and a legitimating knowledge.

A new level of administration was set by Vladimir Putin right after his election in May 2000 and has become a symbol of the militarization of political elites in Russia, concretized by a massive recruitment of people from the so-called power ministries. Beyond this, in the context of a closed institutional game and the power’s will to neutralize a whole bunch of the political game’s rules, law also becomes a ground on which to build a control of the political and administrative elites’ recruitment. Our approach blends a critical overview of the literature and a prosopographical study of more than 20 members of Russian top political elites between 2000 and 2012, corresponding to Putin’s three first mandates as the head of the Russian state – two as President and a third one as Prime Minister under Dmitri Medvedev’s Presidency.

Our study led us to the conclusion that, not only should we regard Law as esteemed but also, and above all, as invested with an instrumental function by the power in place, but also those who long to be in power.

This paper aims to examine the role in tax evasion and corruption played in Ukraine by money-laundering organisations called “conversion centres”: networks of sham firms and banks implementing “black cash” schemes that facilitate tax evasion by the private sector and embezzlement by the state sector. The paper describes their embedding both in a post-Soviet state as well as in the international political economy.

It draws on scholarship, journalist investigations, court records, government agency reports and other open source data and interviews with market participants. It first describes “conversion centres” as an ideal type and then presents three case studies, focusing on international financial flows and the domestic political setting.

Ukraine’s conversion centres generate significant international flows of dirty money handled by specialised foreign banks mostly in the Baltic states. Domestically, conversion centres thrive through state capture, resulting from their facilitation of embezzlement by state actors.

Open source data and investigative methods make it possible to conduct empirical research in crime and corruption in the post-Soviet context. As open sources expand, the scope for such enquiry will increase.

This is the first empirical description of “black cash” money-laundering platforms in terms of embedding in a post-Soviet state and in the international financial system.

This paper aims to examine the shift away from the traditional distinction between organised crime and terrorist groups towards their conceptual convergence under the crime-terror nexus narrative in the context of international security and development policy in post-Soviet Central Asia. It assesses the empirical basis for the crime-terror and state-crime nexus in three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – and argues that the exclusion of the state from the analytical framework undermines the relevance of the crime-terror paradigm for policy-making.

This paper draws on a literature review of academic research, recent case studies highlighting new empirical evidence in Central Asia and international policy publications.

There is a weak empirical connection between organised crime and Islamic extremists, such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hizbut Tahrir, in Central Asia. The state-crime paradigm, including concepts of criminal capture, criminal sovereignty and criminal penetration, hold more explanatory power for international policy in Central Asia. The crime-terror paradigm has resulted in a narrow and ineffective security-oriented law enforcement approach to counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism but does not address the underlying weak state governance structures and political grievances that motivate organised crime and terrorist groups respectively.

International policy and scholarship is currently focussed on the areas of convergence between organised crime and terrorist groups. This paper highlights the continued relevance of the traditional conceptual separation of terrorist and organised crime groups based on their different motives, methods and relationship with the state, for security and democratic governance initiatives in the under-researched Central Asian region.

The purpose of this paper is to assess and highlight the approach taken towards the legal control of illicit money laundering taken in the Republic of Kazakhstan, in particular, the role played by an amnesty on the legalisation of illicit funds. This is particularly important as a basis for a wider discussion about the proper limits of the “criminalising” approaches commonly taken in anti-money laundering regulations.

The discussion and evaluation in the paper is based upon a conceptual analysis of the money laundering regime in Kazakhstan, in particular, the legal framework and policies of implementation adopted.

The paper demonstrates that the problems that are posed by the shadow economy in post-Soviet transition societies can make the blanket criminalisation of money laundering a self-defeating approach, unless accompanied by measures which allow for the achievement of “market-constituting” effects.

The paper draws on experience and practice in one jurisdiction only (Kazakhstan); it also limits its focus to one particular example of a money laundering amnesty policy. Both of these limitations, therefore, suggest avenues for further comparative research.

The paper’s conclusions about the interactions between the shadow economies of transitional societies and the global anti-money laundering agenda have wider application in assessments of international law in this area.

The paper aims to discuss the perception of the police by members of the public in post‐Soviet Russia following their personal experiences of policing, identify broader social implications of the contemporary public image of the Russian police and assess the potential for changing the current situation.

The discussion is conducted on the basis of findings derived from an empirical study carried out by the author which involved qualitative interviews with members of the public who had personal experiences of policing, and with police officers.

Findings indicate a very negative perception of the police by members of the public. Personal experiences of police misconduct appear to affect negatively citizens' general evaluations of the entire institution.

The study was small, and only those who have had personal encounters with the police were interviewed, so the findings should not be treated as necessarily representing attitudes of the population in general.

The negative public image of the police revealed by this study has numerous dangerous consequences: people feel insecure and unprotected, lose trust towards legal authorities and refuse to cooperate with the police.

Distrust towards the police generates a situation where citizens have to be self‐reliant in protecting themselves against crime. Many of the strategies adopted towards this end are problematic.

The paper presents a unique insight into public perceptions of the Russian police. It may suggest implications for policy and practice that could help enhance support of citizens for the police, or at least prevent further deterioration of the existing situation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore relatively neglected side of corruption – citizen-initiated bribe offers – to identify the degree to which citizens on the grassroots level are ready to support top-down government anti-corruption policies.

Drawing on Avessalom Podvodny’s framework of modalities, this research analyzes the results of the nationally representative survey of 1,002 respondents, and ten in-depth interviews – both held in Azerbaijan. The author uses both logistic regression and qualitative description to highlight research inferences.

Modalities provide a new way of making sense of the factors affecting corruption, and informality. Bribe offers are associated with imbalance within Local-Global, Symbol-Content, Active-Passive pairs of modalities. All of the relevant independent variables (except for one), drawn from relevant theories and organized around modalities, are statistically significant in predicting bribe offers.

The paper is able to pose and answer fundamental policy questions: why villagers in Azerbaijan prefer to invest in building mosques and cemeteries rather than schools and kindergartens? Why insurance is not perceived as a sphere of business by the Azerbaijani population? On a practical level, the paper shows that governments’ selective focus on bureaucratic graft neglects formidable argument that the problem of corruption is tightly woven into political culture of a post-Soviet society. Simple administrative measures cannot overcome fundamental value orientations within a society.

The paper adds to corruption researchers’ toolkit, by expanding research to factors affecting citizen voluntary choices to bribe. The research shows what specific variables should be considered and which of them are statistically significant in explaining citizen choices.

When managers wish to raise external capital, investors must be able to trust that brokers and managers will not cheat them out of their money. To what extent is government regulation necessary for the existence of advanced financial transactions and, for that matter, the well functioning of markets in general? A growing literature argues that strong state enforcement is needed to foster financial markets (La Porta et al, 1997, Glaeser et al, 2001). The problem of contractual performance and, more generally, the problem of social order are some of the most enduring questions in the social sciences. German sociologist Georg Simmel may have put it most eloquently in his 1910 essay when he asked, “How is Society Possible?” but the question is rooted in a discourse dating back at least to Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan. Hobbes contended that social order was impossible without external enforcement, and in a similar manner many modern commentators in law and finance maintain that the state must play an active role for markets to function. In his study of emerging financial markets in post‐Soviet Russia, Timothy Frye (2000:2) argues that, “politics underpins social order”.