School of Social & Political Sciences

Dr Gavin Slade joins the Centre for Russian, Central and East European Studies in December 2015. Slade received his PhD from Oxford University in 2012. He has worked at Ilia State University, Tbilisi and the University of Toronto. Directly prior to coming to Glasgow, Slade was a Research Fellow at the Freie Universitat, Berlin. 

Slade is a criminologist who focuses on the countries of the former Soviet Union. His work is underpinned by an interest in the social organization of violence in these countries and has focused particularly on organized crime, policing, prison reform and the politics of crime. 

Slade's first book Reorganizing Crime: Mafia and Anti-Mafia in Post-Soviet Georgia was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. His work has also appeared in the British Journal of Criminology, Law and Society Review, Punishment and Society, Post-Soviet Affairs, and European Security. In 2015, Slade edited a special issue of Theoretical Criminology on crime in the former Soviet Union, part of a long-standing interest in the development of criminology in the region.        

In Berlin, Slade was funded by the German Excellence Initiative and the Marie Curie Foundation to carry out a project entitled 'Post-Soviet Prison: Reform, Order and Violence after the Gulag'. This is a comparative sociological study that examines the varying effects of prison architectural reform projects in Georgia, Lithuania and Kyrgyzstan on social relations, group formation and violence among prisoners. Slade is also currently working on collaborative projects on the political economy of punishment in the former Soviet Union, the transplantation of post-Soviet organized criminal groups in western Europe, and the policing of 'hooliganism' in Kazakhstan.

First published: 10 July 2015