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This book is about urban terror - its meaning, its ramifications, and its impact on city life. Written by a well-known expert in the field, "Cities in a Time of Terror" draws on data from more than a thousand cities across the globe and traces the evolution of urban terrorism between 1968 and 2006. It explains what kinds of cities have become prime targets, why terrorism has become increasingly lethal, and how its inspiration has changed from secular to religious. The author describes urban terrorism as an attempt to use the city's own strength against itself, forcing it to implode, and delineates three basic logics of terrorist choices for targeting cities. The book also includes a discussion of local resilience - the city's capacity to bounce back from attack - and suggests how that can be sustained. Examples from New York, London, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Moscow, Paris, and Madrid illustrate the book's central themes.
This book brings into focus the ways in which the implementation of cameras and systems, and their operation and technical features, are the product of decisions and policies made ina variety of contexts and by a variety of authorities and interested parties. It examines the cultural contextin which cameras are deployed and explores how this context can shape their diffusion and use. The bookplaces particular emphasis on studies of video surveillance in different national, institutional, cultural andlinguistic settings.pIOS Press is an international science, technical and medical publisher of high-quality books for academics
Based on ethnographic research in Hamburg Sternschanze and utilizing the cultural criminological perspective as an underlying theme, this book explores the contested spaces of gentrified inner city neighborhoods. It examines the complex and sometimes paradoxical interplays of urban revaluation, criminalized anti-gentrification resistance, and urban control. The main focus lies on the spatialized commodification of urban counter-culture and its incorporation into the process of gentrification. It is shown that by these processes, "authentic" anti-gentrification resistance becomes increasingly sanitized. Blurred and hardly distinguishable from commodified rebellion, it eventually loses its subversive power and political vigor, and, unwillingly, turns into an integral of the process of urban revaluation it is originally meant to defend. (Series: Hamburger Studien zur Kriminologie und Kriminalpolitik - Vol. 50)
This edited collection reports the results of a comparative study of video surveillance/CCTV in Germany, Poland, and Sweden. It investigates how video surveillance as technologically mediated social control is affected by national characteristics, with a specific concern for recent political history. The book is motivated by asking what makes video surveillance "tick" in three very different cultural settings, two of which (Poland and Sweden) are virtually unexplored in the literature on surveillance. The selection of countries is motivated by an interest in societies with recent experiences of authoritarianism, and how they respond to the global trend towards intensified technical means of control. With thorough empirical studies, the book constitutes an important contribution to security studies, surveillance studies, and post-communist area studies.
Since the 1960s, a significant effort has been underway to program computers to “see” the human face—to develop automated systems for identifying faces and distinguishing them from one another—commonly known as Facial Recognition Technology. While computer scientists are developing FRT in order to design more intelligent and interactive machines, businesses and states agencies view the technology as uniquely suited for “smart” surveillance—systems that automate the labor of monitoring in order to increase their efficacy and spread their reach. Tracking this technological pursuit, Our Biometric Future identifies FRT as a prime example of the failed technocratic approach to gover...
Explores how the United States and other countries have balanced the use of DNA databanks in criminal justice with the privacy rights of their citizenry, arguing that collecting DNA from those who are arrested, but not charged, can infringe on their constitutional rights and debunking the myth that DNA profiling is infallible.
While the military use of drones has been the subject of much scrutiny, the use of drones for humanitarian purposes has so far received little attention. As the starting point for this study, it is argued that the prospect of using drones for humanitarian and other life-saving activities has produced an alternative discourse on drones, dedicated to developing and publicizing the endless possibilities that drones have for "doing good". Furthermore, it is suggested that the Good Drone narrative has been appropriated back into the drone warfare discourse, as a strategy to make war "more human". This book explores the role of the Good Drone as an organizing narrative for political projects, tech...
This collection considers the implications for privacy of the utilisation of new technologies in the criminal process. In most modern liberal democratic states, privacy is considered a basic right. Many national constitutions, and almost all international human rights instruments, include some guarantee of privacy. Yet privacy interests appear to have had relatively little influence on criminal justice policy making. The threat that technology poses to these interests demands critical re-evaluation of current law, policy, and practice. This is provided by the contributions to this volume. They offer legal, criminological, philosophical and comparative perspectives. The book will be of interest to legal and criminological scholars and postgraduate students. Its interdisciplinary methodology and focus on the intersection between law and technology make it also relevant for philosophers, and those interested in science and technology studies.
A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives. Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society, Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their de...
The political economy of punishment suggests that the evolution of punitive systems should be connected to the transformations of capitalist economies: in this respect, each 'mode of production' knows its peculiar 'modes of punishment'. However, global processes of transformation have revolutionized industrial capitalism since the early 1970s, thus configuring a post-Fordist system of production. In this book, the author investigates the emergence of a new flexible labour force in contemporary Western societies. Current penal politics can be seen as part of a broader project to control this labour force, with far-reaching effects on the role of the prison and punitive strategies in general.