Gavin Slade
Biographic Data
| ID | 254135 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gavin Slade |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gavin |
| FAMILY NAME | Slade |
| SIGNATURE | SLADE G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Nazarbayev University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3279-8892 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 26 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction—Reckoning with the East
In July 2022, the Law and Society Association met in Lisbon to reckon with colonialism. Russia had launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine five months earlier, yet the war was barely mentioned. This introduction takes that silence as its starting point. It describes how a 2024 workshop in Oñati brought together scholars from Eastern Europe and Eurasia to ask whether frameworks built elsewhere can explain socio-legal dynamics there. We outline…
Punitiveness in the global east
This article examines public attitudes towards punishment in Kazakhstan through a Global East lens. Drawing on focus group data from settlements historically shaped by Soviet penal colonies, the study finds that punitiveness in Kazakhstan is structured by the memory and material legacy of Soviet convict-settler colonialism. In contrast to findings from the Global North and South, fear of crime and hostility towards ethnicised or racialised ‘other…
Who recounts the Stalinist past? Mnemonic roles, acts of remembering and life-scripts in Russian families
This article asks why some memories of the Stalinist Gulag are shared while others are not. Considering remembering as a social act, we argue that who engages in acts of remembering, to whom, when and how helps explain what is remembered. The article draws on family memories shared by participants of 16 focus groups in four research sites in Russia. We find that mnemonic actors - most often grandmothers - remember victimhood in veiled ways, struc…
The pains of prison reform
Building on the growing literature on the varying degrees and dimensions of prisoner governance across prison systems, this paper aims to understand how such governance, and reforms to reduce its informal influences, shape prisoner experiences in Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has limited the influence of prisoner governance through the creation of a cell-based prison system, while Lithuania has maintained penal colonies in which prisoners largel…
Our zona
How does the closure of prisons impact local communities where the prison is sited? The paper compares three prison closures in northern and central Kazakhstan through field observations, interviews, and focus groups at the sites. We find that respondents unanimously opposed closure by appealing to the apparent good performance of the prison. Beyond the economic loss incurred by closure, respondents reported a loss of communal identity, as well a…
A Sense of Stalinism
This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The m…
Ghosts of the Gulag
The paper develops the concept of penal spectrality—a sense of the presence of those who endured past penal suffering within environments and among objects related to the practice of punishment. The residents of Ukhta, a Gulag town in Northern Russia, engage uncomfortably with penal spectrality and employ two forms of distancing—pragmatic and cultural—to deal with its melancholic affects. Pragmatically, residents repurpose and reincorporate the t…
East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in Criminology
This paper identifies an absence in currently constituted criminological discourse on the Global North and Global South. This absence is the Global East. The Global East is not a defined region but a relation of betweenness, geographically and geo-politically, within and between the South and North, representing peoples from countries and societies which fit imperfectly into a North/South binary. We focus on the Eastern European and Eurasian regi…
Unlikely downsizers
Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – s…
Reorganizing Crime
Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that began in the 1930s in the Soviet prison camps. For reasons that the book attempts to explain, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network-criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. At this tim…
Managing drugs in the prisoner society
Through the case study of Kyrgyzstan this paper argues that a rapidly increasing availability of drugs in prison is not necessarily deleterious to solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs depends on the forms of prisoner control over drug sale and use. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. State provision of opioid maintenance therapy i…
The Limits of Authoritarian Modernisation
We study police inertia and the depth of public mistrust in, and apathy towards, zero tolerance policing (ZTP) in Kazakhstan. Using survey, social media and official data we show how ZTP failed: politicians did not summon any political will for the policy, the police subverted any attempted reforms, while citizens ignored them. The failure of ZTP delineates the limits of authoritarian modernisation. We argue that modernisers require assistance fr…
Prisoner Games Children Play
This paper argues that pre-adolescent peer-group socialization in Georgia still refers to criminal subculture known as the thieves’ world. Through ethnographic observation of children playing games borrowed from the prison context, the paper asks what function these games now have. The paper argues that children no longer see the subcultural capital of the thieves’ world as a viable currency to gain status, or the games as modeling important func…
Prison Worlds
No abstract available
Informality as illegality in Georgia’s anti-mafia campaign
The paper examines the anti-mafia laws in Georgia and links the decline of informality under Saakashvili with the use of punitive measures in a concerted effort to establish legal centrism over and above other extra-legal normative orders. The paper discusses the specific informal practice of the obshchak , or mutual aid fund, and how this evolved to become linked to organized crime, making it an object of criminalization. Finally, the paper argu…
Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia
Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sent…
Violence as Information During Prison Reform
When reform occurs in prison systems, prisoner insecurity increases. One reason for this is disorganization. The disruption to informal governance structures, distributions of power and mechanisms for establishing trust causes conflicts. This paper argues that a key mechanism linking disorganization to conflict and violence is information flow. Incomplete information in interpersonal interaction marks prison settings. Informal institutions for pr…
Mafias, Criminology of
Crime and criminal justice after communism
This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to con…
Architecture and attachment
This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet …
In search of recognition
In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status…
Zero-tolerance schooling
This paper explores the consequences of the massive investment in criminal justice in Georgia following the Rose Revolution of 2003. We argue that this resulted in “governing through crime” – the outflow of criminal justice practices and logics into other unrelated policy spheres. We demonstrate this by looking at responses to the issue of safety in schools. We show that up to 2007, despite a moral panic surrounding school violence, policy-makers…
Reorganizing Crime
'Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that began in the 1930s in the Soviet prison camps. For reasons that the book attempts to explain, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network—criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. At this ti…
No Country for Made Men
This article studies the decline of a long-standing mafia known as thieves-in-law in the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti-mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves-in-law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves-in-law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio-economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilie…
Georgia and Thieves-in-Law
Tbilisi: TraCCC, 212 pp, Price Not Available, ISBN 99928-0-826-8 paperback
Architecture and attachment
This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet …
No Country for Made Men
This article studies the decline of a long-standing mafia known as thieves-in-law in the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti-mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves-in-law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves-in-law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio-economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilie…
In search of recognition
In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status…
Managing drugs in the prisoner society
Through the case study of Kyrgyzstan this paper argues that a rapidly increasing availability of drugs in prison is not necessarily deleterious to solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs depends on the forms of prisoner control over drug sale and use. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. State provision of opioid maintenance therapy i…
Informality as illegality in Georgia’s anti-mafia campaign
The paper examines the anti-mafia laws in Georgia and links the decline of informality under Saakashvili with the use of punitive measures in a concerted effort to establish legal centrism over and above other extra-legal normative orders. The paper discusses the specific informal practice of the obshchak , or mutual aid fund, and how this evolved to become linked to organized crime, making it an object of criminalization. Finally, the paper argu…
Zero-tolerance schooling
This paper explores the consequences of the massive investment in criminal justice in Georgia following the Rose Revolution of 2003. We argue that this resulted in “governing through crime” – the outflow of criminal justice practices and logics into other unrelated policy spheres. We demonstrate this by looking at responses to the issue of safety in schools. We show that up to 2007, despite a moral panic surrounding school violence, policy-makers…
East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in Criminology
This paper identifies an absence in currently constituted criminological discourse on the Global North and Global South. This absence is the Global East. The Global East is not a defined region but a relation of betweenness, geographically and geo-politically, within and between the South and North, representing peoples from countries and societies which fit imperfectly into a North/South binary. We focus on the Eastern European and Eurasian regi…
Unlikely downsizers
Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – s…
Prison Worlds
No abstract available
Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia
Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sent…
Violence as Information During Prison Reform
When reform occurs in prison systems, prisoner insecurity increases. One reason for this is disorganization. The disruption to informal governance structures, distributions of power and mechanisms for establishing trust causes conflicts. This paper argues that a key mechanism linking disorganization to conflict and violence is information flow. Incomplete information in interpersonal interaction marks prison settings. Informal institutions for pr…
The Threat of the Thief
This piece gives an account of the Georgian government's recent attempts to crackdown on the institution of thieves-in-law [vory-v-zakone] within Georgian society. The events surrounding the problematisation of the thieves-in-law are examined and different answers are offered to the underlying question of the article: what threat does this subversive group pose to the government? It is argued that the vory do not represent a potential criminal re…
The Limits of Authoritarian Modernisation
We study police inertia and the depth of public mistrust in, and apathy towards, zero tolerance policing (ZTP) in Kazakhstan. Using survey, social media and official data we show how ZTP failed: politicians did not summon any political will for the policy, the police subverted any attempted reforms, while citizens ignored them. The failure of ZTP delineates the limits of authoritarian modernisation. We argue that modernisers require assistance fr…
Prisoner Games Children Play
This paper argues that pre-adolescent peer-group socialization in Georgia still refers to criminal subculture known as the thieves’ world. Through ethnographic observation of children playing games borrowed from the prison context, the paper asks what function these games now have. The paper argues that children no longer see the subcultural capital of the thieves’ world as a viable currency to gain status, or the games as modeling important func…
Crime and criminal justice after communism
This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to con…
The pains of prison reform
Building on the growing literature on the varying degrees and dimensions of prisoner governance across prison systems, this paper aims to understand how such governance, and reforms to reduce its informal influences, shape prisoner experiences in Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has limited the influence of prisoner governance through the creation of a cell-based prison system, while Lithuania has maintained penal colonies in which prisoners largel…
A Sense of Stalinism
This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The m…
Georgia and Thieves-in-Law
Tbilisi: TraCCC, 212 pp, Price Not Available, ISBN 99928-0-826-8 paperback
Georgia and Thieves-in-Law
Tbilisi: TraCCC, 212 pp, Price Not Available, ISBN 99928-0-826-8 paperback
The Threat of the Thief
This piece gives an account of the Georgian government's recent attempts to crackdown on the institution of thieves-in-law [vory-v-zakone] within Georgian society. The events surrounding the problematisation of the thieves-in-law are examined and different answers are offered to the underlying question of the article: what threat does this subversive group pose to the government? It is argued that the vory do not represent a potential criminal re…
No Country for Made Men
This article studies the decline of a long-standing mafia known as thieves-in-law in the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti-mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves-in-law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves-in-law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio-economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilie…
Reorganizing Crime
'Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that began in the 1930s in the Soviet prison camps. For reasons that the book attempts to explain, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network—criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. At this ti…
In search of recognition
In this article we draw on research conducted in a British immigration removal centre (IRC) to explore the affective nature of detention. We consider staff and detainee testimonies of their everyday interactions within the IRC as bids for recognition of social status in an institution characterized by uncertainty and diversity. In their accounts, men and women draw on gendered identities to make sense of others and themselves. Responses to status…
Zero-tolerance schooling
This paper explores the consequences of the massive investment in criminal justice in Georgia following the Rose Revolution of 2003. We argue that this resulted in “governing through crime” – the outflow of criminal justice practices and logics into other unrelated policy spheres. We demonstrate this by looking at responses to the issue of safety in schools. We show that up to 2007, despite a moral panic surrounding school violence, policy-makers…
Mafias, Criminology of
Crime and criminal justice after communism
This special issue focuses on crime and criminal justice in the former Soviet Union (FSU), a world region we believe should be better known to criminologists. Together with all our fellow authors, we hope to convey to readers the fascination of the postSoviet region and the thought-provoking criminological questions that it prompts. We also aim to stimulate debate about what criminologists elsewhere in the world can learn from the FSU, and to con…
Architecture and attachment
This article looks at the trajectory of prison reform in post-Soviet Georgia and Russia. It attempts to understand recent developments through an analysis of the resilient legacies of the culture of punishment born out of the Soviet period. To do this, the article fleshes out the concept of carceral collectivism, which refers to the practices and beliefs that made up prison life in Soviet and now post-Soviet countries. The collapse of the Soviet …
Violence as Information During Prison Reform
When reform occurs in prison systems, prisoner insecurity increases. One reason for this is disorganization. The disruption to informal governance structures, distributions of power and mechanisms for establishing trust causes conflicts. This paper argues that a key mechanism linking disorganization to conflict and violence is information flow. Incomplete information in interpersonal interaction marks prison settings. Informal institutions for pr…
Informality as illegality in Georgia’s anti-mafia campaign
The paper examines the anti-mafia laws in Georgia and links the decline of informality under Saakashvili with the use of punitive measures in a concerted effort to establish legal centrism over and above other extra-legal normative orders. The paper discusses the specific informal practice of the obshchak , or mutual aid fund, and how this evolved to become linked to organized crime, making it an object of criminalization. Finally, the paper argu…
Popular Punitiveness? Punishment and Attitudes to Law in Post-Soviet Georgia
Georgia is the only country in the post-Soviet region where incarceration rates significantly grew in the 2000s. Then in 2013, the prison population was halved through a mass amnesty. Did this punitiveness and its sudden relaxation after 2012 impact attitudes to the law? We find that these attitudes remained negative regardless of levels of punitiveness. Furthermore, the outcomes of sentencing may be less important than procedures leading to sent…
Prisoner Games Children Play
This paper argues that pre-adolescent peer-group socialization in Georgia still refers to criminal subculture known as the thieves’ world. Through ethnographic observation of children playing games borrowed from the prison context, the paper asks what function these games now have. The paper argues that children no longer see the subcultural capital of the thieves’ world as a viable currency to gain status, or the games as modeling important func…
Prison Worlds
No abstract available
Managing drugs in the prisoner society
Through the case study of Kyrgyzstan this paper argues that a rapidly increasing availability of drugs in prison is not necessarily deleterious to solidarity and inmate codes. Instead, the fragmentary effect of drugs depends on the forms of prisoner control over drug sale and use. In Kyrgyzstan, prisoners co-opted heroin and reorganized its distribution and consumption through non-market mechanisms. State provision of opioid maintenance therapy i…
The Limits of Authoritarian Modernisation
We study police inertia and the depth of public mistrust in, and apathy towards, zero tolerance policing (ZTP) in Kazakhstan. Using survey, social media and official data we show how ZTP failed: politicians did not summon any political will for the policy, the police subverted any attempted reforms, while citizens ignored them. The failure of ZTP delineates the limits of authoritarian modernisation. We argue that modernisers require assistance fr…
Reorganizing Crime
Thieves-in-law' (vory-v-zakone in Russian) are career criminals belonging to a criminal fraternity that began in the 1930s in the Soviet prison camps. For reasons that the book attempts to explain, thieves-in-law became exceptionally prevalent in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Here, by the 1990s, they formed a mafia network-criminal associations that attempt to monopolize protection in legal and illegal sectors of the economy. At this tim…
Unlikely downsizers
Since 2000, the prison rate has declined significantly in Kazakhstan. This article demonstrates that the Kazakhstani prison service, counterintuitively, became a key advocate of prison downsizing owing to a coalescence of norms and incentives in the 1980s and 1990s. In the process, the prison service elite maintained the loyalty of rank-and-file personnel through a focus on reform to performative and quantifiable measures of penal performance – s…
The pains of prison reform
Building on the growing literature on the varying degrees and dimensions of prisoner governance across prison systems, this paper aims to understand how such governance, and reforms to reduce its informal influences, shape prisoner experiences in Estonia and Lithuania. Estonia has limited the influence of prisoner governance through the creation of a cell-based prison system, while Lithuania has maintained penal colonies in which prisoners largel…
Our zona
How does the closure of prisons impact local communities where the prison is sited? The paper compares three prison closures in northern and central Kazakhstan through field observations, interviews, and focus groups at the sites. We find that respondents unanimously opposed closure by appealing to the apparent good performance of the prison. Beyond the economic loss incurred by closure, respondents reported a loss of communal identity, as well a…
A Sense of Stalinism
This article compares visitor experiences at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow and the NKVD Prison Museum in Tomsk, Siberia. The museums differ in the production of authenticity in the museum experience. The Moscow museum has no direct relationship to a site of memory and therefore utilizes constructed forms of authenticity. In contrast, the Tomsk museum makes use of objective authenticity given its location in an original prison building. The m…
Ghosts of the Gulag
The paper develops the concept of penal spectrality—a sense of the presence of those who endured past penal suffering within environments and among objects related to the practice of punishment. The residents of Ukhta, a Gulag town in Northern Russia, engage uncomfortably with penal spectrality and employ two forms of distancing—pragmatic and cultural—to deal with its melancholic affects. Pragmatically, residents repurpose and reincorporate the t…
East is East? Beyond the Global North and Global South in Criminology
This paper identifies an absence in currently constituted criminological discourse on the Global North and Global South. This absence is the Global East. The Global East is not a defined region but a relation of betweenness, geographically and geo-politically, within and between the South and North, representing peoples from countries and societies which fit imperfectly into a North/South binary. We focus on the Eastern European and Eurasian regi…
Who recounts the Stalinist past? Mnemonic roles, acts of remembering and life-scripts in Russian families
This article asks why some memories of the Stalinist Gulag are shared while others are not. Considering remembering as a social act, we argue that who engages in acts of remembering, to whom, when and how helps explain what is remembered. The article draws on family memories shared by participants of 16 focus groups in four research sites in Russia. We find that mnemonic actors - most often grandmothers - remember victimhood in veiled ways, struc…
Introduction—Reckoning with the East
In July 2022, the Law and Society Association met in Lisbon to reckon with colonialism. Russia had launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine five months earlier, yet the war was barely mentioned. This introduction takes that silence as its starting point. It describes how a 2024 workshop in Oñati brought together scholars from Eastern Europe and Eurasia to ask whether frameworks built elsewhere can explain socio-legal dynamics there. We outline…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Criminology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (15 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Prison (13 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (11 works) · Psychology (9 works)