Compliance, Defiance, and ‘Dirty’ Luxury: New Perspectives on Anti-Corruption in Elite Contexts

This book interrogates the transnational field of (anti-)corruption and elite crime. Using the lens of luxury, art, and antiquities, the contributors reconceptualize the driving dialectics of corruption and anti-corruption. Compliance, Defiance and ‘Dirty Luxury’ brings together scholars across criminology, anthropology, sociology, and the humanities to tackle these dialectics from different angles and positions, digging deeper into these corrupt zigzags of compliance and defiance. Such an approach reveals a self-reinforcing, accelerating, neoliberal perpetuum mobile churning out a frenzy of public-private crime-fighting initiatives that stimulate the expansion of various control and surveillance architectures which time and again fail. This volume opens new theoretical and empirical paths of investigation for criminologists and anthropologists alike. While the book speaks primarily to academic audiences and graduate students, it also appeals to a broad range of professionals.