Introduction: “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: Transnational Perspectives on the Extralegal Field

The Introduction sets the conceptual boundaries of the debate with which the whole collection of chapters engages. On the one hand, it refers to the different strands of literature which have dealt with notions of informality, licitness/illicitness, legality/extralegality, and criminalization. On the other, it defines the fil rouge weaving together the book contributions around three main axes: (1) the social morality of crime; (2) the “people versus state” opposition; (3) informality and resistance.