The Mexico-Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.

The Mexico–Guatemala border has emerged as a geopolitical hotspot of illicit flows of both goods and people. Contraband Corridor seeks to understand the border from the perspective of its long-term inhabitants, including petty smugglers of corn, clothing, and coffee. Challenging assumptions regarding security, trade, and illegality, Rebecca Berke Galemba details how these residents engage in and justify extralegal practices in the context of heightened border security, restricted economic opportunities, and exclusionary trade policies. Rather than assuming that extralegal activities necessarily threaten the state and formal economy, Galemba's ethnography illustrates the complex ways that the formal, informal, legal, and illegal economies intertwine. Smuggling basic commodities across the border provides a means for borderland peasants to make a living while neoliberal economic policies decimate agricultural livelihoods. Yet smuggling also exacerbates prevailing inequalities, obstructs the possibility of more substantive political and economic change, and provides low-risk economic benefits to businesses, state agents, and other illicit actors, often at the expense of border residents. Galemba argues that securitized neoliberalism values certain economic activities and actors while excluding and criminalizing others, even when the informal and illicit economy is increasingly one of the poor's only remaining options. Contraband Corridor contends that security, neoliberalism, and illegality are interdependent in complex ways, yet how they unfold depends on negotiations between diverse border actors.

Louis Mandrin led a gang of bandits who brazenly smuggled contraband into eighteenth-century France. Michael Kwass brings new life to the legend of this Gallic Robin Hood, exposing the dark side of early modern globalization. Decades later, the memory of Mandrin inspired ordinary subjects and Enlightened philosophers alike to challenge royal power.

It is ironic that those whose job it is to save lives often find themselves injured in the course of performing their duties. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, healthcare workers have higher injury rates than agriculture workers, miners, and construction workers. The Handbook of Modern Hospital Safety, Second Edition covers expo

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling offers a comprehensive survey of interdisciplinary research related to smuggling, reflecting on key themes, and charting current and future trends. Divided into six parts and spanning over 30 chapters, the volume covers themes such as mobility, borders, violent conflict, and state politics, as well as looks at the smuggling of specific goods – from rice and gasoline to wildlife, weapons, and cocaine. Chapters engage with some of the most contentious academic and policy debates of the twenty-first century, including the historical creation of borders, re-bordering, the criminalisation of migration, and the politics of selective toleration of smuggling. As it maps a field that contains unique methodological, ethical, and risk-related challenges, the book takes stock not only of the state of our shared knowledge, but also reflects on how this has been produced, pointing to blind spots and providing an informed vision of the future of the field. Bringing together established and emerging scholars from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of conflict studies, borderland studies, criminology, political science, global development, anthropology, sociology, and geography.

This book presents a new analytical framework and reviews in detail Mexico’s political and economic history between the 1980s and the late 2010s. The explanation offered is based on the idea of ‘misplaced monopolies’ – i.e. an open political regime but a weak, fragmented state, and an internationally open economy but highly concentrated economic sectors and activity in the domestic sphere. Accordingly, sown in the course of the crisis-ridden 1980s and 1990s, misplaced monopolies grew roots and became core features of Mexico’s political economy in the 2000s and 2010s. The end result has been great wealth concentration and a dramatic growth in brutal violence in many parts of the country. From this perspective, unless ‘misplaced monopolies’ are reversed, conditions will remain prone to crisis, polarization and conflict in Mexico. The volume concludes by extrapolating the framework and placing Mexico in comparative perspective alongside internationally important countries such as Brazil, China, India and Russia. This is a highly original investigation that will interest people who follow Mexican politics and its economy. The analytical framework will be of use to analysts, scholars and students of comparative political economy, democratization studies, market reforms, and security and conflict studies.

A cellar door creaked open in the middle of the night, or a hand slipping quickly into a trenchcoat—the most compelling transactions are surely those we never see. Smuggling can conjure images of adventure and rebellion in popular culture—Han Solo knew all about it, as did Al Capone—but as Simon Harvey shows in this fascinating book, smuggling has had a profound effect on the geopolitics of the world. Shining a light onto seven centuries of dark history, he illuminates a world of intrigue and fortunes, hinged on outlaw desires and those who have been willing to fulfill them. Harvey tells this story by focusing on the most coveted contrabands of their time. In the Age of Discovery, these were silk, spices, and silver. During the days of western empires, they were gold, opium, tea, and rubber. And in modern times it has been, of course, drugs. To the side of these major commodities, he looks at a wide array of things that have always been in smugglers’ trunks, from guns to art to—the most dangerous of all—ideas. Central to this story are the (not always) legitimate forces of the Dutch and British East India Companies, the luminaries of the Spanish Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Nazis, Soviet trophy brigades, and the CIA, all of whom have made smuggling, at one point or another, part of their modus operandi. Beneath this, Harvey traces out the smaller-time smugglers, the micro-economies of everyday goods, precious objects, and people, drawing the whole story together into a map of a subterranean world crisscrossed by smugglers’ paths. All told, this is the story of the unrelenting drive of markets to subvert the law, of the invisible seams that have sewn the globe together.