This is a rich, absorbing novel about good, evil, and the inability of the legal system to mediate between the two. Two white Milwaukee motorcycle cops pursue and kill a young black man on a bitterly cold winter night in 1959 and with the help of their su

Gang-related violence has forced thousands of Hondurans to flee their country, leaving behind everything as refugees and undocumented migrants abroad. To uncover how this happened, Jon Carter looks back to the mid-2000s, when neighborhood gangs were scrambling to survive state violence and mass incarceration, locating there a critique of neoliberal globalization and state corruption that foreshadows Honduras’s current crises.

Carter begins with the story of a thirteen-year-old gang member accused in the murder of an undercover DEA agent, asking how the nation’s seductive criminal underworld has transformed the lives of young people. He then widens the lens to describe a history of imperialism and corruption that shaped this underworld—from Cold War counterinsurgency to the “War on Drugs” to the near-impunity of white-collar crime—as he follows local gangs who embrace new trades in the illicit economy. Carter describes the gangs’ transformation from neighborhood groups to sprawling criminal societies, even in the National Penitentiary, where they have become political as much as criminal communities. Gothic Sovereignty reveals not only how the revolutionary potential of gangs was lost when they merged with powerful cartels but also how close analysis of criminal communities enables profound reflection on the economic, legal, and existential discontents of globalization in late liberal nation-states.

Unmasks the horrors of a social order reproduced and maintained by the violence of police

Year after year the crisis churns: graft and corruption, violence and murder, riot cops and armored vehicles claim city streets. Despite promises of reform, police operate with impunity, unaccountable to law. In The Horror of Police, Travis Linnemann asks why, with this open record of violence and corruption, policing remains for so many the best, perhaps only means of security in an insecure world. 

Drawing on the language and texts of horror fiction, Linnemann recasts the police not only as self-proclaimed “monster fighters” but as monsters themselves, a terrifying force set loose in the world. Purposefully misreading a collection of everyday police stories (TV cop dramas, detective fiction, news media accounts, the direct words of police) not as morality tales of innocence avenged and order restored but as horror, Linnemann reveals the monstrous violence at the heart of liberal social order. 

The Horror of Police shows that police violence is not a deviation but rather a deliberate and permanent fixture of U.S. “law and order.” Only when viewed through the refracted motif of horror stories, Linnemann argues, can we begin to reckon the limits of police and imagine a world without them. 

Banks accused of rate-fixing. Members of parliament cooking the books. Major defense contractors investigated over suspect arms deals. Police accused of being paid off by tabloids. The headlines are unrelenting these days. Perhaps it’s high time we ask: Just exactly how corrupt is Britain?
            David Whyte brings together a wide range of leading commentators and campaigners, offering a series of troubling answers. Unflinchingly facing the corruption in British public life, they show that it is no longer tenable to assume that corruption is something that happens elsewhere; corrupt practices are revealed across a wide range of venerated institutions, from local government to big business. These powerful, punchy essays aim to shine a light on the corruption fundamentally embedded in UK politics, police, and finance.

Favelas, or shantytowns, are where cocaine is mainly sold in Rio de Janeiro. There are some six hundred favelas in the city, and most of them are controlled by well-organized and heavily armed drug gangs. The struggle for the massive profits from this drug trade has resulted in what are increasingly violent and deadly confrontations between rival drug gangs and a corrupt and brutal police force, that have transformed parts of the city into a war-zone. Lucia tells the story of one woman who was once intimately involved with drug gang life in Rio throughout the 1990s. Through a series of conversations with the author, Lucia describes conditions of poverty, violence, and injustice that are simply unimaginable to outsiders. In doing so, she explains why women like her become involved with drugs and gangs, and why this situation is unlikely to change.

Policing as a global form is often fraught with excessive violence, corruption, and even criminalization. These sorts of problems are especially omnipresent in postcolonial nations such as India, where Beatrice Jauregui has spent several years studying the day-to-day lives of police officers in its most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In this book, she offers an empirically rich and theoretically innovative look at the great puzzle of police authority in contemporary India and its relationship to social order, democratic governance, and security.
 
Jauregui explores the paradoxical demands placed on Indian police, who are at once routinely charged with abuses of authority at the same time that they are asked to extend that authority into any number of both official and unofficial tasks. Her ethnography of their everyday life and work demonstrates that police authority is provisional in several senses: shifting across time and space, subject to the availability and movement of resources, and dependent upon shared moral codes and relentless instrumental demands. In the end, she shows that police authority in India is not simply a vulgar manifestation of raw power or the violence of law but, rather, a contingent and volatile social resource relied upon in different ways to help realize human needs and desires in a pluralistic, postcolonial democracy.
 
Provocative and compelling, Provisional Authority provides a rare and disquieting look inside the world of police in India, and shines critical light on an institution fraught with moral, legal and political contradictions.
 

In July 1976, a twenty-four-year-old white woman, Margo Olson, was found in a shallow grave in Stamford, Connecticut, with an arrow piercing through her heart. A few weeks later, Howie Carter, her black boyfriend, was killed by the police. Howie and Margo’s interracial relationship held a distorted mirror to the author’s own, with Howie’s best friend, Joe. Joe’s theory was that the police didn’t have any evidence to arrest Howie; operating on the assumption that the black man is always guilty, they killed him instead. Margo’s murder was never solved.

Looking back at what might have happened in 1976, the author discovers a Bicentennial year steeped in recession, racism, and unrelenting violence. It was also a time of flourishing second-wave feminism, when young women were encouraged to do anything, if only they knew how. Stamford was in the midst of urban renewal, destroying historically black neighborhoods to create space for corporations escaping a bankrupt and dangerous New York City, just forty miles away. Organized crime followed the money, infiltrating Stamford at all levels. The author reveals how racism, misogyny, the economy, and corruption affected the young people’s daily lives, and helped lead Margo and Howie to their deaths.