On 8 April 2016, two local police officers in Oradea fined a woman and her mother for leaving household waste beside the wrong bin. Within hours, the incident had left the street and entered a Facebook group with more than 24,000 members. Nine years later, the European Court of Human Rights has used that ordinary,…
Category: Policing
The Use of Sound Weapons Against Peaceful Demonstrators as a Threat to Human Rights and a Factor Undermining Trust in the Police (Đorović and Others v. Serbia)
On 15 March 2025, Belgrade saw one of the largest peaceful demonstrations in Serbia’s recent history, the culmination of a protest movement that had been building for months after the collapse of a concrete canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad in November 2024, in which people died. Students and a significant part of…
Rent on Prohibition of Sex Work: How State Generates Police Corruption
On 20 May 2026, the Office of the Prosecutor General and the Security Service of Ukraine conducted a large-scale anti-corruption operation targeting the National Police of Ukraine. Investigative actions were carried out simultaneously across three regional police departments – Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, and Zhytomyr oblasts. Five individuals were served with notices of suspicion: the head and…
The Kyiv Tragedy of 18 April 2026: A Criminological and Human Rights Analysis
Holosiivskyi district of Kyiv. A typical Saturday. A busy supermarket. An armed man opens fire on the crowd, then barricades himself inside the building, taking hostages. The result: six dead, over 15 wounded, including a child. A raid was carried out by KORD special forces, and the attacker was neutralised. The weapon used by the…
The Algorithm as Witness: Errors in the Criminal Justice System Through the Lens of Technological Determinism
On 29 March 2026, CNN published a report on a case that might have been dismissed as yet another instance of bureaucratic negligence, were it not for one crucial detail: the basis for the arrest of a Tennessee resident was facial recognition carried out by Clearview AI — a company with a database containing billions…
“Motherland” Protects Its Fraudsters: Russia Is Building a Telephone Iron Wall
Russia has taken another step toward ensuring the safety of its citizens — and, as one might guess, toward achieving its own telecommunications self-sufficiency. According to the second package of “anti-fraud measures,” which the State Duma passed in its first reading in February, the government plans to block incoming international calls to landlines for Russians…
“We’ll Be Closing the Windows”: The Self-Isolation of Russian Society as a Performance of a Carceral State
— How many open windows do we have in total? — They’re all open. — We don’t know when to stop. Well then, we’ll close the open windows. Yevgeny Schwartz. “To Slay the Dragon” (1944) There is a particular kind of academic ‘stagnation’: when a phenomenon is so vast and so obvious that the scientific…
Anesthesia of Consumption and Surgery of Control: A Two-Phase Model of Authoritarian Governance of the Digital Space in Russia
Social science has long sought to explain why citizens of authoritarian states do not mount mass resistance against systems that openly restrict their rights. Traditional answers reduce to either fear of repression or ideological indoctrination. Neither, however, fully accounts for the phenomenon observed in post-Soviet Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century: the relatively…
War, Total Surveillance, and The Collapse of Social Control (Criminological Reflections on the Paradox of the Panopticon in Armed Conflict)
Contemporary criminology has long theorised surveillance as the cornerstone of social control. From Bentham’s Panopticon to Foucault’s disciplinary society, and from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the “synopticon” to other surveillance studies, the prevailing assumption holds that the totalising gaze of the state and its apparatuses produces order, compliance, and the internalisation of norms. Yet armed…