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A work of collaborative ethnography that investigates extortive practices across the globe.

What makes an offer impossible to refuse? Combining original ethnography with compelling storytelling, this book traces the social life of extortion across Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Ecuador, Guatemala, India, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. The research is grounded in collaborative and comparative ethnography conducted by a team of anthropologists, bringing together fieldwork from across the world to reveal how extortive logics shape different domains of life and following the circulation of threats and the distribution of intimidation across society.

The result is a gripping read about the ordinariness of extortion beyond conventional organized crime and mafia spheres. The chapters document how the strength of extortion lies in the gradual and complicit inclusion of individuals and populations within relationships that are simultaneously attractive and violent—capturing the overlapping dimensions of compulsion and choice that define so many of today's livelihoods. In doing so, this book illustrates the dynamics of coercion, force, and consent, and offers a fresh perspective on economic violence that moves away from exclusive legalistic definitions of extortion.

An examination of how time is used as a policing tactic in border and migrant policy.

Time is seldom on the migrant’s side. Migrants crossing the US southern border are “immediate threats,” according to the government agencies and politicians hell-bent on their capture and deportation, and those caught in the US are forced to endure grueling months in detention centers and in queues for judicial hearings.

On Border Time examines temporal dimensions of violence and associated ideological conditioning in an increasingly privatized and militarized immigration system. Visiting the National Border Patrol Museum in El Paso, Texas, Cristina Jo Pérez shows how state-supported histories of national “progress” and migrant “backwardness” manufacture political subjects. Meanwhile, the media and political narratives of imminent threat criminalize Brown men and boys, justifying Border Patrol shootings as preemptive national defense. Dramatically widening her lens, Pérez further considers how the anti-immigrant agenda bleeds into the future, through aggressive state intervention into migrants’ reproductive lives. From a heat-of-the-moment police encounter to a Houston gynecologist’s waiting room, On Border Time is a profound meditation on policies and discourses that put migrants out of sync and, by extension, out of the nation.

Frank Tannenbaum Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology​
Faculty Senate Award for Research from Loyola University New Orleans​

Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.