The Janus-faces of cross-border crime in Europe

Europe is changing rapidly, which may also have a bearing on its criminal landscape. This does not mean that all sorts of new crime are emerging: a large part of the crimes remains profit-oriented and is committed by known modus operandi. That is the old face of crime. Amidst the traditional landscape new faces of crime can be identified. The internet is such a new face which emerges among others in the sex industry. This is as old as the human race, with all the related abuses and exploitation. But the internet gives it also a new face because of its broad reach and related opportunities, negative as well as positive. This volume provides other examples of this two-faced Janus head of crime. Old criminal trades, such as the illegal cigarette market, synthetic drugs and criminal exploitation of human labour, but also new criminal specialisations, new professional and industrial skills developed by `old' ethnic minorities on various crime markets in central Europe. Meanwhile, the on-going illegal migrations continue to exert their influence on the perception of crime: while the actual prevalence of most types of crime decreases, fear of crime continues to increase. The flow of migrants is unrelated to this outcome but it impacts nevertheless on the perception of crime. This volume of the 18th Cross-border Crime Colloquium, held in Bratislava in the spring of 2017, contains the peer-reviewed contributions of 22 European experts and up-and-coming researchers. Their chapters cover a broad field of crime in which the double faced Janus head can be discerned: illegal migrants, criminal markets, corruption, money laundering and organised crime, highlighting many new aspects.

Introduction: the multiple meaning of the Janus face in crime (Petrus.C. van Duyne); The Janus-faced victimisation in human smuggling and human trafficking (Gwen Herkes); The emergency business. Migrants reception, mafia interests and glocal governance: from Lampedusa to Rome. (Giacomo Orsini & Anna Sergi); Illegal migration, crime and the public response in the Czech Republic (Miroslav Scheinost); The role of the Internet in the process of trafficking humans in the UK (Parisa Diba, Georgios A. Antonopoulos & Georgios Papanicolaou); The role of Vietnamese criminal networks in drug crime. The Czech Republic case (Miroslav Nozina); On the persistence of an open illegal market: Explaining the continued existence of street-vending of contraband cigarettes in Berlin since 1990 (Trang Nguyen & Klaus von Lampe); The normalisation of arms trafficking in times of conflict: the Ukrainian experience (Anna Markovska & Alexey Serdyuk); Panama papers, Paradise documents and the Slovene state in the global competitiveness race (Matjaz Jager); The crusade for purity: Corruption and laundering (Petrus C. van Duyne, Jackie H. Harvey & Liliya Y. Gelemerova); Opacity of business ownership and the risk of money laundering (Michele Riccardi & Riccardo Milani); VAT fraud committed in the Slovak Republic in context of the European Union (Tomas Stremy, Natalia Hangacova & Martin Kotovsky); Italian strategies against the infiltration of the criminal organi-sation in the economy (Anna Maria Maugeri)