New scholarship · once a month
Academic journals and articles on parapolitics, crime and the state, and fascism in media. Each month's entries are checked against their DOI and filed with the rest of the Articles and Journals list, flagged Current Academic Work.
Reads the sound design of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) as “auditory ruination,” a sonic uncanny built from the weird and the eerie in Mark Fisher’s sense. The film strips the colonial administrator of psychological mastery and exposes the foundational paranoia of the imperial enterprise.
A Marxist feminist reading of the far right's politics of the body, from Tucker Carlson's The End of Men to tradwife culture, as a crisis of social reproduction.
An anthropological article on microfascism, examining how far right politics takes hold through charm and the textures of ordinary everyday interaction.
Traces how Italian far-right alternative music grew as a counter-movement to both conservative and progressive 1968 culture, including the movement’s appropriation of Tolkien and fantasy, and its radicalisation during the Years of Lead.
A poetics of fascist literary reportage. Breza’s montage and speed devices make Slovak-German “friendship” look like a path to modernization, set against communist and anti-modernist reporting.
A review of Zane Elward's Comic Fascism, a study of how comics in Italian children's periodicals spread Fascist, Catholic and Americanist ideals from 1922 into the postwar years.
Codes 900 images from the Instagram, Facebook and X accounts of six European radical right leaders. Gender effects depend on platform, and female leaders use more agentic cues.
Argues that defence-funded brain-computer interfaces, language models and fusion databases could support continuous psychological coercion of detainees. Places the lineage in MKULTRA and surveillance capitalism.
Compares how Obama and Trump decided on the killings of Osama bin Laden and Qassem Soleimani, and how the tool yields short and medium term political and electoral gains.
A review essay on two edited volumes about postwar trials of Nazi era crimes in East and Central Europe and how those trials were mediated and remembered.
Compares the Fatemiyoun Brigade and the Wagner Group by origins, leadership, militant profile, equipment and finance, and concludes that the risks of using paramilitaries come from structural dynamics inside the groups.
Treats Cosa Nostra as an informal but de facto policing actor in Palermo, a vicar extralegal power and industry of violent protection, drawing on 2022 interviews with police, citizens and activists.
A theoretical article proposing a mid range theory of how states use illicit financial flows as an adaptive instrument of hybrid statecraft and financial power.
Argues that corruption now works as a performed genre. Shame recedes into spectacle and impunity is staged as proof of sovereignty, so democratic erosion has to be read culturally as well as legally.
Introduces five contributions on how corruption becomes embedded and normalised across political, administrative and social settings.
Compares organised crime and terrorism through social learning, neutralisation and moral disengagement. Ideology separates the two, so criminology has to be joined to terrorism and political studies.
An OECD working paper on shifts in the gold market, setting out four scenarios for gold in geofinance, illicit financial flows and critical mineral supply chains.
Dates are index dates and can be issue dates. Entries marked pending have no abstract in the index.