McMafia : A Journey through the Criminal Underworld, is a remarkable piece of journalism by Misha Glenny. He follows corruption and organised crime around the word, drawing on interviews that reveal the global encircling of Mafia-like activity. His likening of

A question I can rely on being asked at any public talk I give is “Does your descriptions of how psychologists may help to solve crimes make criminals savvy and better able to avoid detection?” It is a fascinating question

Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, from comic to president. Pepsi and Coke fight over their share of the market not by major changes in their products but by their advertising and marketing. Like most companies selling in a mass market, they reach

The pragmatic desire to ensure that research, especially social science research, has ‘impact’, that is consequences for those outside the research community, is growing priority for funding agencies (although it is curiously absent from the arcane realms of elementary particle

It is well established that climate change and environmental degradation are intensifying the pressures on crucial resources such as food and water security and air quality.  These pressures are especially difficult to counteract in the least developed economies.  Yet if

What is the measure of a man? There are various emetics, but here’s one … Photo: David Canter) Having recently enjoyed voluntary severance from my academic post (less troubling than my vasectomy), after half a century as an academic, I

Tin-yuet Ting from Hong Kong interviewed those who took part in recent protests over democratic crises in Hong Kong.(Photo: Studio Incendo/Flickr/CC BY 2,0) It is generally accepted that it is difficult to be a young person in these less than

A crime or a terrorist act? Or both? The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) was quick to claim that 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, who killed dozens and injured hundreds more in Las Vegas, was

The usual image of political activism is of young people, probably students, waving banners, or even throwing cobbles at serried ranks of law enforcement. But as the eleven papers, brought together for an issue of Contemporary Social Science, by Melissa

Although most citizens in developed Western societies have relatively little direct contact with crime as victims and even fewer as offenders, criminality reaches out to influence most aspects of people’s daily lives. Criminology and related social science disciplines rarely examine