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Recent research has shown that spending in urban green spaces including parks has fostered gentrification, a process known as green gentrification. But could ongoing gentrification and gentrificati...

In December 2019, a Chinese court sentenced Jiankui He, the scientist who used genome editing to create three babies via in vitro fertilization (IVF), to three years in prison for practicing medici...

The Biden administration’s first legislative step is a reminder of what government ought to be about. The massive pandemic relief bill addresses many of the huge challenges created by the pandemic....

The Finances of Regional Organisations in the Global South sets out to contribute to the fields of comparative regionalism, inter-regionalism and political sociology by addressing a gap in the lite...

This paper traces the changing role of wealth and movements of money in investigators' evolving anthropological imagination of the social structure of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its relationship with its surrounding in key moments of Antimafia investigations in one Sicilian province over the past 40 years. The routes of money, which initially marked exchange-based relations between two otherwise mutually extraneous actors, gradually indexed a more complex combination of reciprocity, exchange, and redistribution both within the mafia legally constructed and in its relationship to its surrounding. At the same time, the public and official anthropological imaginary of the mafia-politica nexus permits only exchange between mutually-external parties or reciprocity as an entity-creating internal thread. As a result, the complexity of wealth, which investigations reveal by 'following money,' requires constant reduction to individual bearers of monetary worth and interests.

Cultural patronage has since long been a domain where urban elites can showcase a sense of philanthropy. The paper develops a heuristic that starts from cultural patronage activities in order to trace urban elite households and their professional and residential characteristics. The heuristic is deployed in Brussels, Belgium, where we use cultural patronage listings from five key high-culture institutions as an empirical entry-point into urban elite geographies. Contrary to the common claim that current urban elites are global elites, our analysis shows a clear national reproduction of Brussels elites. Specific for Brussels is a remarkable level of nobility resilience, based on its more-or-less successful entanglements with haute finance as well as art market intermediary functions. Furthermore, the residential analysis suggests that elite reproduction also predominantly depends on socio-spatial segregation in inner-city neighborhoods, yet lacks morphological segregation strategies typical of enclave urbanismor super-gentrification generally found across global cities.

While Roma are both Europe’s largest minority, there is no “homeland” state that claims to guard their interest. The lack of “an external national homeland” [Brubaker, R. 1996. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] to watchdog and safeguard their rights has a particular effect on how Roma engage as political actors and subjects. International donors/foundations have assumed the role of “external homeland”. This article explores the effect that donors’ funding priorities have on Romani advocacy – specifically Romani journalism. Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork in five countries, extensive document analysis, and interviews, Idemonstrate that the change in Romani media content over the past two decades reflects the shift in funders’ priorities, particularly in relation to the European project. “The Roma” become a tool for donors and European institutions to build a “European” identity while Romani-led advocacy becomes in...

Behavioural tracking is an increasingly discussed method of early detection of potential gambling-related problems. Recent research has focused predominantly on information derived from gambling transactions and communication logs. Even though payment behaviour establishes a direct link to the financial consequences of gambling, it had thus far not become subject to this field of research. This article uses transactional data generated by 2696 customers from the online gambling label bwin.com to investigate how far specific payment behaviours and specific payment methods enable a prospective differentiation between self-excluders and controls. The number and amount of deposits, the variance of withdrawals, the amount of funds subject to reversed withdrawals and the usage of mobile phone billing were found to be positively associated with self-exclusion; the number of active gambling months and the usage of electronic wallets and prepaid cards negatively. Customer age displayed a U-shaped relation,...

In an earlier book by Sara Reckhow, Follow the Money (2012), the author drew attention to the significance of money in the analysis of education policy, and specifically how major US philanthropies...

Private sector participation in education has both changed and intensified in recent years, engendering dramatic shifts in policies and schooling practices. These shifts have garnered the attention...

The Russian state bodies and personnel assigned to implement the country's anti-moneylaundering (AML) policies seem to have allowed the Russian political leadership and its principal allies to move large shares of the wealth they have acquired during the Putin era abroad. Although some of this wealth was accumulated illegally, a great deal of it is the result of activity that is allowed in Russia but prohibited in most economically advanced countries, such as insider trading. As is the case with Russian criminal and regulatory enforcement agencies, the Russian Federal Monitoring Service (RosFinMonitoring)1 and other relevant state bodies selectively enforce AML policies, focusing on low-level and mid-level officials and businesspersons who do not enjoy high-level political patrons.Why Money Is Laundered and How It Is Related to CorruptionTraditionally, money laundering is an important element of the ability of corrupt government officials and their allies to profit from their political power-that is, officials use the process to treat the state as their own private property. In Russia, political and economic elites often act with impunity when they violate their country's laws, because they know that they will not be investigated or prosecuted for their illegal activities.Generally, money laundering is conceptually divided into three distinct stages or phases. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, these three stages are placement, layering, and integration, but these are best viewed as one process. The placement stage represents the initial entry of the proceeds from crime into the financial system. This stage serves two purposes-it relieves the criminal of holding and guarding the large physical bulk of cash and places the money in the legitimate financial stream. Layering is the process of separating the capital from its illegal source. During the integration stage, the earnings are converted into apparently legitimate earnings. The placement stage is considered to be the riskiest, for it is then that the chances of raising suspicion are the greatest.2A working AML system should have the ability to detect illicit funds at each point in the process. To "follow the money," AML personnel must be able to operate domestically and internationally. When operating abroad, they normally must have good working relations with other financial intelligence units.3The Evolution of Russian Currency and AML PoliciesIn 1992, the Russian State Duma assigned the responsibility for the regulation and control of foreign currency to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (RCB) pursuant to the Law on Hard Currency Regulation and Control.4 This piece of legislation was a framework law empowering the RCB to issue detailed rules covering transactions between Russians and foreign persons. The RCB is nominally independent from the executive branch, with foreign economic policy under the control of the Russian Ministry of Finance.Since the enactment of the Law on Hard Currency Regulation and Control, the volume of Russian trade has grown exponentially and governmental officials have become more familiar with international finance. This has led to fewer requirements in certain areas, decentralization in some regulatory responsibilities, and greater sophistication within the government on foreign economic relations. In recent years, the RCB's authority has become more limited, with the Russian governmental bodies responsible for collecting taxes and customs duties assuming responsibility for areas formerly under RCB auspices. Compared with the central banks in other countries, the RCB seems to have less autonomy. At times, it seems as if the Russian political leadership treats the RCB as if it were an executive body.Despite the growing internationalization of the finance sector, it was not until August 7, 2001, that Russia finally enacted a law making money laundering a criminal offense. …

Contrary to studies that argue there is no direct link between Cold War era politics and the shift in the United States from confessional to tax‐supported Humanistic studies of religion, this paper explores whether such direct evidence does in fact exist. Focusing mainly on the National Defense Fellowships that were instituted by the US federal government soon after the launch of Sputnik, the essay concludes that there is considerable warrant for further investigations into the public and private funding that made the Humanistic study of religion a reality in the mid‐1960s to late 1960s. Given current worldwide political and military developments, and the manner in which some scholars of religion are arguing for the relevance of the study of religion for those wishing to ensure the spread of liberal democracy, it may now be the time to reconsider the Cold War history of our field.

People with responsibility for scholarly assets agree: digital preservation is an important and urgent issue that libraries must address to fulfill their mission on behalf of future scholarship. In...