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This chapter argues that the literature on the politics of punishment generally, and on US exceptionalism specifically, suffers from insufficient attention to serious violence. It complicates conventional assumptions about democratic politics, mass publics, and crime. Drawing on three cases—the United Kingdom, the United States, and the state of Pennsylvania—this chapter illustrates that rates of violence matter for political attention to crime. It also shows that the politicization of crime does not always lead to a singular focus on punishment and that this politicization in the United States is shaped by both high rates of violence and distinctive institutional dynamics that decouple crime from related social and economic insecurities. The consequence is an (exceptional) political process in the United States that makes it difficult for the polity to make the state pay for high rates of violence and the criminogenic conditions that give rise to them.

This chapter concludes that it was precisely in this period of postwar Stalinism that the party perfected the accusation of bribery as a weapon. Accusations of bribery became a non-violent tool to disgrace people in the post-mass-terror state. After the war, accusation of graft, one of the mundane realities of Russian life for centuries, became one of the party and procuracy’s preferred methods of targeting the leading legal institutions and other agencies and individuals. High court judges were accused not of political crimes under article 58 but of regular white-collar crimes. This change was something of an innovation in Stalinism. An accusation of corruption was an effective way of destroying a party member. The Procuracy sought evidence that would discredit judges both professionally—through accusations of selling their office, and personally—through accusations of “clannishness,” sexual “deviance,” or other moral corruption. In the absence of the pre-war practice of using of violence to punish entire categories of imagined criminals after the war, accusations of bribery served a critical purpose; not just to discredit people as trustworthy representatives of Soviet power, but also to destroy them as carriers of revolutionary truth. Bribery was a most effective charge, because its moral and political disgrace was total; it implied the corruption of the whole person. This chapter examines a bribery scandal in the Military Collegium and the military tribunals.

As chapter 6 shows, in the years between the start of World War II and the death of Stalin, the Soviet regime relied on a network of secret informants in its efforts to halt what the regime considered to be a veritable epidemic of crimes against state property and the socialist economy. Alongside regular police work, the use of a vast informant network was the primary tool for uncovering the corrupt activities of Soviet officials. What were its strengths and weaknesses? Why did some people refuse to inform?

This chapter focuses on international collaboration in the policing of political crimes. It describes the earliest attempts to establish a veritable organization of international police cooperation and the conditions that affected their success or failure. The one with the broadest international representation took place in Europe, specifically when the ‘First Congress of International Criminal Police’ was held in Monaco in 1914.

This chapter is the ninth section of Kadivar’s ‘Treatise on Refuting the Punishment for Blasphemy and Apostasy’. It analyses four issues: The Method of Retaining the Permanent Nature of a Legal Ruling, A Comparison between the Permanence of Killing an Apostate with the Ruling on Theft and Some Rulings on Jihad, Change of the Subject Matter of Apostasy from the Time of the Imams to Now, and Apostasy and Freedom of Thought. In the estimation of rational beings, the subject matter of apostasy in the Qur’an, the hadith corpus, and past rulings is not identical to its understanding in our times, because the subject matter in the former is broader than changing one’s religion or leaving Islam. It extends to both aligning oneself with the enemies of and propagandising against Muslims, which would constitute a form of political, military and cultural rebellion against the state’s authority. But today, changing one’s faith is understood to be merely a conversion without any ulterior motives. Contemporary rational beings consider the subject matter of apostasy to be connected with religious and cultural freedom, whereas Islamic jurisprudence considers it to be a political crime: belligerency against the state. These two viewpoints are poles apart.

This chapter discusses the events surrounding and leading up to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by operatives of the Saudi regime in the country’s consulate in Istanbul. It explains the killing of Khashoggi—an insider who knew too much—as a function of the new repression in Saudi Arabia. The chapter examines Khashoggi’s transformation from a regime propagandist to a persona non grata, explaining this change with reference to the abrupt rise of Crown Prince Muhammad ibn Salman and the shift in Saudi politics that it brought about.