Since 2019, Lebanon's financial crisis is taking the headlines of major newspapers. In this blog post, PhD candidate Cybele Atme outlines, in line with many historical analysis, how Lebanon's contemporary financial system has been shaped by colonialism and foreign interests.
In this blogpost, PhD candidate Isabella Regan discusses the role of private online investigations in conflict settings. Paying specific attention to its use in the current conflict in Ukraine, she touches upon challenges related to legal, ethical and practical implications. The next four years, she will conduct a critical analysis of public and private power (im)balances within online open-source investigations of (transnational) crimes.
Tomorrow begins the European qualifying campaign for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. At the same time, a report recently published in The Guardian revealed that thousands of migrant workers have died in Qatar over the course of preparations for the tournament. This blog post discusses this report in light of the wider context of corruption within the sport, and reflects on the nature and trajectory of professional world football going forward.
The heist of the century. Thinking of a diamond or bank robbery? Art theft? Something à la Money Heist, Ocean’s Eleven or The Killing? Its less glamorous but more harmful than that: the Cum-Ex Files.
In this blog post, Anna Merz shortly discusses how the intermingling of state and corporate actors—law enforcement authorities, politicians and financial institutions—has contributed to the (so far) rather lenient response to the scandal, and the preservation of the status quo.
Today’s guest writer for the Rotterdam Criminology Blog is Mathijs Giltjes, a PhD Candidate from Erasmus School of Law who researches high frequency trading and market abuse. In this blog post, Mathijs offers a critical reflection on the value and limitations of the EU financial criminal law framework in combating high-frequency trading. This blog post carries important criminological relevance in relation to technology and cybercrime, and the unique challenges of developing effective criminal justice system responses to crimes of the powerful.
In this blog post, Anna Merz explores the 2019 film Dark Waters from a criminological perspective. Based on the New York Times Magazine’s article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare”, the film portrays attorney Rob Bilott (starred by Mark Ruffalo) and his legal fight against chemical giant DuPont for knowingly polluting the environment and endangering workers and society’s health. Dark Waters provides insights into the power struggle as a natural corollary of corporate crimes and the pitfalls of (self-)regulation.