This volume explores the continuous line from informal and unrecorded practices all the way up to illegal and criminal practices, performed and reproduced by both individuals and organisations. The authors classify them as alternative, subversive forms of governance performed by marginal (and often invisible) peripheral actors. The volume studies how the informal and the extra-legal unfold transnationally and, in particular, how and why they have been/are being progressively criminalized and integrated into the construction of global and local dangerhoods; how the above-mentioned phenomena are embedded into a post-liberal security order; and whether they shape new states of exception and generate moral panic whose ultimate function is regulatory, disciplinary and one of crafting practices of political ordering.

Abel Polese is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction of Dublin City University, Ireland. 

Alessandra Russo is Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre Emile Durkheim, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France.

Francesco Strazzari is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Italy, and Adjunct Research Professor at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Norway. 

1. Introduction: 'The good, the bad and the ugly': transnational perspectives on the extra-legal field

Abel Polese, Alessandra Russo, Francesco Strazzari

PART I: The social morality of crime

2. Conversations bamakoises in time of crisis: criminalisation of everyday life and state formation in Mali 

Giovanni Zanoletti

3. The Criminalisation of Informal Practices in the Danube Delta: how and why 

Giulia Prelz Oltramonti and Mihnea Tanasescu

4. Use of language in blurring the lines between legality and illegality 

Gulzat Botoeva

Luis Rivera Vélez

6. Negotiated Prohibition: The Social Organisation of Illegal Gambling in Ukraine 

Anna Markovska and Yuliya Zabyelina

7. Coping mechanisms of Ukrainian patients: bribes, gifts, donations, and connections 

Olena Levenets, Tetiana Stepurko, Milena Pavlova, Wim Groot

8. Collateral Damage of Global Governance on the Local Level - An analysis of fragmented international regimes in the Brazilian Amazon 

Regine Schönenberg

PART II: Opposition of "us" against "them" 

9. Informality and the Revolutionary state in Russia 

Joseph Nicholson

10. Informality, Criminality, and Local Autonomy in the Balkans: A Geographic-Based Analysis of State Confines 

Regis Darques

11. 'Stealing from the state is not stealing really, it is a national sport' - A study of informal economic practices and low-level corruption in Hungary

Fanni Gyurko

12. Cross-border smuggling in north Niger: the morality of the informal and the construction of a hybrid order 

Luca Raineri

13. Informality and state-society relations in post-2011 Tunisia

Ruth Hanau Santini and Stefano Pontiggia

14. If It All Went Up In Smoke. Undercover Communities and Cannabis Regulation in the Emerald Triangle 

Liza Candidi

PART III: Informality and resistance 

15. The First Moldovan Students in Romania (1990-1991): Informal Traders or Agents of Change?

Petru Negura

16. Nothing to Lose: The Power of Subtle Forms of Resistance in an Immigration Detention Centre 

Annalisa Lendaro

17. Out of the rubble: affective infrapolitics in Bangkok

Jaime Moreno

18. Informal governance on cryptomarkets for illicit drugs

Meropi Tzanetakis