Date: 21 April 2021
The International State Crime Initiative is delighted to welcome Professor Kristian Lasslett (University of Ulster) for the talk Looting the North, Looting the South: Investigating Transnational Corruption. The online event will be chaired by Dr. Thomas MacManus (Queen Mary School of Law).
The world of global elites and wealth management is largely hidden from public inspection. The forces which undermine democracy - lack of transparency, opaque circles of influence, informal decision making, monetisation of politics, polarisation of power - are also a boon to all manner of corrupt transactions that game government and markets to engorge the power and wealth enjoyed by practitioners. Working with civil society and journalists, Professor Kristian Lasslett has been investigating bribery, racketeering, fraud, misappropriation, and market manipulation in Uzbekistan and Papua New Guinea, prosecuted by international coalitions of state-corporate actors, employing the financial and corporate machinery available in the UK, Switzerland, Singapore, the US and Australia. In this seminar, Professor Lasslett will discuss the methods used to interrogate the transnational coalition of actors working together across multiple jurisdictions to steal resources, manipulate markets, and launder the proceeds of crime, and some of the key findings from this investigative work.
Professor Kristian Lasslett is Head of the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Ulster and sits on the Executive Board of the International State Crime Initiative. He is joint Editor-in-Chief of State Crime and Editor of The State Testimony Project. Professor Lasslett’s research focuses on criminogenic intersections of state-corporate power, and the communities of resistance that emerge in opposition. This focus has been operationalised through fieldwork on the extractive industries – with a landmark study on the Bougainville conflict – in addition to corruption, land-grabbing and forced evictions. Kristian has published on a range of subjects in leading international journals and edited collections, including scientific method, state theory, action research methodologies, state-corporate crime, state terrorism, and forced eviction. His first book State Crime on the Margins of Empire was published by Pluto Press in August 2014. His second book, Uncovering the Crimes of Urbanisation: Researching Corruption, Violence and Urban Conflict was published by Routledge in 2018.