No abstract

No abstract

This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to consider how criminology in the region itself might develop. In this introduction, we present three distinct theoretical contributions that research on postSoviet crime and criminal justice can make to the global scholarly community.First, we discuss the theoretical utility to criminologists of the post-Soviet transition. Transitions to democracy and the market, whether in South America, Africa, or the former communist bloc, are notable for rapid increases in crime. Yet, we suggest that the transition paradigm now holds diminishing value, after two decades of post-Soviet development in which post-Soviet states have diverged substantially in both incidence of crime and responses to it. Second, as a corollary, we argue that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent development of its successor states provide a natural experiment that helps us understand divergence in crime and criminal justice policy. The FSU provides rich opportunities for both intra-regional and inter-regional comparison. It thus has much to offer to the rapidly developing subfield of comparative criminology.

The migration policies of the former Soviet Union (or USSR) included a virtual abolition of emigration and immigration, an effective ban on private travel abroad, and pervasive bureaucratic controls on internal migration. This article outlines this Soviet package of migration controls and assesses its historical and international distinctiveness through comparison with a liberal state, the United States, and an authoritarian capitalist state, Apartheid South Africa. Soviet limitations on external migration were more restrictive than those of contemporary capitalist states, and Soviet regulation of internal migration was unusual in its direct bureaucratic supervision of the individual. However, Soviet policy did not aim at the suppression of internal migration, but at its complete regularization. The ultimate goal was “regime adherence”: the full integration of the citizen into the Soviet political order. In contrast to the USSR, migration in the contemporary world is marked by “irregularization”: policies that lead to the proliferation of insecure and unauthorized migration.

This is a comparative analysis of policing in three countries that have experienced a major political or social transition, Russia, Brazil, and China. We consider two related questions: (1) how has transition in each country affected the deployment of the police against regime opponents (which we term "repression")? And (2) how has the transition affected other police misconduct that also victimizes citizens but is not directly ordered by the regime ("abuse")? As expected, authoritarian regimes are more likely to perpetrate severe repression. However, the most repressive authoritarian regimes such as China may also contain oversight institutions that limit police abuse. We also assess the relative importance of both transitional outcomes and processes in posttransition policing evolution, arguing that the "abusiveness" of contemporary Brazilian police reflects the failure to create oversight mechanisms during the transition, and that the increasing "repressiveness" of Chinese police reflects a conscious effort by the Chinese Communist Party to reinforce the police in an era of economic liberalization. In contrast, Russian police are both significantly abusive and repressive, although less systematically "repressive" than Chinese police, and less "abusive" (or at least violent)