Overview

This is the pioneering book that investigates reputation laundering at an institutional – state – level. Theorising the nascent phenomenon by situating it within the state crime framework, offering both empirical and theoretical account of reputation laundering at length, this book reveals the ways corruption is facilitated by global institutions and powerful elites. Drawing upon extensive empirical evidence, participant observations, and interviews, Kleptocratic Reputation Laundering and State Crime inspects state violence, corruption and authoritarian repression, and how competing narratives of change reflect these topics. It offers a critical exploration of the elite enablers of reputation laundering, using the Uzbek state as a primary example. It interrogates their role and motivations in engaging in the coordinated campaigns, and modes of justification in framing their own complicity. Building on Bourdieu, the book cultivates an original conceptual framework – elite technocratic habitus – to elucidate such forms of complicity within influential institutions and elite milieus. This book is essential reading for those involved in research or activism on crimes of the powerful, state crime, human rights, global financial institutions and complicity in the development sector. It will benefit students of criminology, law, sociology, anthropology, politics and critical media studies, as well as policy communities and civil society organisations.

Full Product Details

9781041127451

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Reputation laundering remains a seriously under researched area of state crime denial. Dilmira Matyakubova, in her excoriating and powerful corrective, uncovers the veil behind which kleptocratic states employ a myriad of creative techniques to obscure, ameliorate and deny their crimes. But perhaps more importantly this book brilliantly exposes the ways in which reputation laundering requires not only the criminal state’s strategies of denial and cover-up but the enabling endorsement of ‘respectable’ international financial institutions. As the book makes vividly clear state crime and its denial is never solely the province of the state whose reputation requires laundering – it is endemic to the capitalist project itself.” Penny Green, FAcSS, Professor of Law and Globalisation, Director of the International State Crime Initiative at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London “An incisive and rigorous study, this book reveals how modern kleptocratic states use reputation laundering to engineer legitimacy. Matyakubova presents a bold and original inter-disciplinary study, which fuses Bourdieusian sociology with the state crime framework, and produces a study of real empirical depth on elite complicity and ceremonial power. The result is essential reading for scholars of state crime, authoritarianism, and international relations.” Shane Mac Giollabhui, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Ulster “This monograph advances a theoretically grounded, empirically rich analysis of reputation laundering for states. Integrating state crime scholarship with Bourdieusian theory, it also develops an original conceptual framework for understanding state-led reputation laundering. The timely and important case study of post-Soviet Uzbekistan makes it essential reading for scholars of criminology, law and international relations, and for anyone interested in how states find innovative ways to launder reputations and maintain an image of legitimacy.” Thomas MacManus, Senior Lecturer in State Crime and Acting Director at the International State Crime Initiative at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London

Author Information

Dilmira Matyakubova is Visiting Scholar at the International State Crime Initiative (Queen Mary University of London). She holds a PhD degree in Applied Social and Policy Sciences.

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