Xenakis, Sappho (2011) Organised crime in Greece: defining and assessing the threat. Εφαρμογές Δημοσίου Δικαίου 24 (2), pp. 137-145. ISSN 1106-0549.
Abstract
Insidious, multi-dimensional forms of organised crime embody one of the most extreme forms of illegality often believed to bedevil Greece. Additionally spurred by the intensification of international attention upon organised crime over the last twenty years, this issue has become a prominent public concern in Greece, alongside –if sometimes overshadowed by– domestic political violence, foreign affairs, immigration, and corruption. Nevertheless, just as in other jurisdictions regionally and internationally, the evolution of policy in Greece has seen questions raised about the appropriate definition and measurement of organised crime. As has been the case in other countries, Greece has seen official strategies to counter organised crime shaped and, more importantly, limited, as much by what they have included as by what they have left out; high-level corruption and white collar crime being key examples of the latter. Equally, Greece has also seen the unfurling of official strategies to counter organised crime whose priorities have had very little logical basis in empirical assessments, and have been far more significantly structured by the content and styles of domestic and international policy dogmas, themselves produced by quite different priorities and assessments. Indeed, the discussion of the Greek case presented here does not suggest any significant aberration from the international trend in which the problematisation of organised crime has been overwhelmingly determined by political, rather than expert, pressures. Yet, indicative of the preponderantly legal more than sociological character of sociolegal scholarship in Greece, the socio-political context that has conditioned the problematisation of organised crime in the country has rarely been subjected to systematic analysis. The review presented in this article of the challenges faced in defining and assessing the threat posed by organised crime in Greece is therefore offered as a synoptic contribution towards this end.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2013 08:37 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:03 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6521 |
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.
Archive Staff Only (login required)
