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AbstractRescue has long been a defense for the removal of cultural property. Since the explosion of iconoclasm in West Asia, North Africa, and West Africa, there has been a growing demand for cultural property in danger zones to be "rescued" by being purchased and given "asylum" in "safe zones" (typically, in the market countries of Western Europe and North America). This article reviews evidence from natural experiments with the "rescue" of looted antiquities and stolen artifacts from across Asia and Europe. Unsurprisingly, the evidence reaffirms that "rescue" incentivizes looting, smuggling, and corruption, as well as forgery, and the accompanying destruction of knowledge. More significantly, "rescue" facilitates the laundering of "ordinary" illicit assets and may contribute to revenue streams of criminal organizations and violent political organizations; it may even weaken international support for insecure democracies. Ultimately, "rescue" by purchase appears incoherent, counter-productive, and dangerous for the victimized communities that it purports to support.

'Rescue' has long provided a justification for the handling of illicit cultural goods, yet the specific consequences of this practice have not been systematically documented. This paper draws on historic, recent and still-emerging cases around the world to assess the resurgent argument that looted antiquities and stolen artefacts should be rescued through purchases made by private collectors. It shows that the practice is promoted by politically exposed persons, who use it for money laundering and reputation laundering; that proceeds from the practice may be received by transnational organised crime groups; and that its social and political acceptability is exploited to facilitate fraud and embezzlement. While many of these cases demonstrate complicity on the part of elites and authorities within the societies that are victimised, they are emblematic of the global structure of this enterprise. They also reaffirm the complicity of markets and authorities in the Global North/West in illicit flows of cultural assets that are exceptionally harmful to societies in the Global South/East.

This essay presents the findings of the International Conference on Handling of Cultural Goods and Financing of Political Violence and introduces provenance research that examines the market in Europe for antiquities from Asia and the market in North America for antiquities from Europe. It summarises findings, such as the involvement of violent political organisations, transnational organised criminals and politically-exposed persons (PEPs) in illicit trafficking of cultural objects. It also highlights some foundations for progress, such as enhanced traceability and due diligence in the art market, plus action and cooperation to respond to illicit flows as regional problems. On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

This study uses open-source intelligence to analyse the illicit excavation and illicit trafficking of archaeological goods (and forgeries) across the Balkan-Eastern Mediterranean region(s) of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Slovenia. It draws on texts and images that have been published by hundreds of artefact-hunters across tens of online communities and other online platforms. These include online forums; social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram; social media, such as Pinterest and YouTube; generic trading platforms, such as eBay, Etsy and olx.ba; and specialist trading platforms, such as VCoins.It shows how artefact-hunters target sites, features and objects; reveal the objects that are collectible and/or marketable; acquire equipment; form patron-client relationships, peer-to-peer partnerships and other cooperative groups; engage in transnational activity; crowdsource techniques for smuggling; crowdsource ways to avoid being caught or punished; and respond to policing. Often, they give identifying details or leave an electronic paper trail that enables their identification. Such information also reveals the destructiveness of processes of extraction and consumption; the economics of the low-end market in cultural goods from poor countries; the gender dimension in cultural property crime and cyber-enabled crime; and the interaction between political allegiance and criminal activity. Thereby, this study shows how netnography and social network analysis can support intelligence-led policing.

'Rescue' has long provided a justification for the handling of illicit cultural goods, yet the specific consequences of this practice have not been systematically documented. This paper draws on historic, recent and still-emerging cases around the world to assess the resurgent argument that looted antiquities and stolen artefacts should be rescued through purchases made by private collectors. It shows that the practice is promoted by politically exposed persons, who use it for money laundering and reputation laundering; that proceeds from the practice may be received by transnational organised crime groups; and that its social and political acceptability is exploited to facilitate fraud and embezzlement.
While many of these cases demonstrate complicity on the part of elites and authorities within the societies that are victimised, they are emblematic of the global structure of this enterprise. They also reaffirm the complicity of markets and authorities in the Global North/West in illicit flows of cultural assets that are exceptionally harmful to societies in the Global South/East.

The illicit trade in antiquities from conflict zones is clandestine and politicised and it very likely involves violent, organised criminals, including paramilitaries and terrorists; so reliable, detailed information is extraordinarily difficult to access. Nonetheless, open-source data may provide clues to the structure of the market. This article reviews the development of the Cypriot antiquities trade until the outbreak of the civil war in 1963, through the cultural heritage crisis that accompanied that conflict until the coup and invasion of 1974. Then, adapting an established method for studying the scale of a small, undisturbed illicit market, it gauges communities' participation in looting during the civil war in Cyprus. It does so by analysing the find-spot and acquisition date information in collections of antiquities recovered before and during conflict, and cross-referencing them with demographic and historical information in order to identify the communities from which the looters probably came. It uses this crude categorical method in order to assess ethnically-based narratives of looting and trading in illicit antiquities. The evidence suggests that: before the conflict, there was no correlation between community and looting; during the civil war, due to economic and geopolitical factors, members of Turkish Cypriot communities were disproportionately involved in looting; at the same time, members of Greek Cypriot communities were far more involved in looting than has previously been recognised; Greek Cypriot archaeologists have misinterpreted the structure of the trade and consequently contributed to communalist policies and nationalist histories; and the antiquities policy of the Republic of Cyprus was one of the significant causes of the developments in the trade.

AbstractThis paper offers a novel explanation for extortion, which is the practice of demanding payments from compliant agents by law‐enforcement officers. Namely, that extortion occurs due to the officer's incompetence, where the competence level is endogenous. Because competence improves enforcement, extortion affects deterrence directly by weakening agents' incentive to be compliant and indirectly by affecting officers' incentives to become competent. Accordingly, the harmful effects of extortion on deterrence depend on whether the competent or incompetent officer extorts. We show that extortion by incompetent officers is the lesser of the two evils, compared to bribery.

Abstract
To enforce compliance, regulators often choose between announced or unannounced (surprise) inspections. We analyze the impact of these inspection regimes on firms' compliance choices in a multiple stage oligopoly game of quantity competition with endogenous compliance, monitoring and avoidance. In equilibrium, whether unannounced inspections achieve a higher level of compliance than announced inspections depends on the number of firms, demand and the cost of compliance. Furthermore, the impact on compliance of increasing the fine, the supervisor's wage or the probability of inspections also depends on market size and structure and may be non-monotonic. Finally we provide conditions under which a welfare maximizing regulator will prefer an unannounced to an announced regime. Thus, our results suggest that when choosing the appropriate inspection regime, regulators should account for market characteristics, especially if compliance maximization is the objective.

This paper analyzes a model in which a firm's compliance with regulation is monitored by a supervisor. The supervisor exerts costly, unobservable effort to raise his inspection intensity, which leads to moral hazard. A non-compliant firm may exert effort in avoidance to reduce the probability of sanction. The regulatory framework is such that inspections may be announced or unannounced. Our analysis derives novel results about the response of monitoring and avoidance to changes in inspection policies, as well as conditions under which a regulator who maximizes compliance prefers unannounced to announced inspections. When the supervisor is corruptible, unannounced inspections are susceptible to a tip-off from the supervisor to the firm in exchange for a bribe. To eliminate bribery, the regulator may reduce the frequency of inspections. However, in an example, we show that eliminating tipping-off may lead to lower compliance unless the supervisor's wage is raised. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This paper analyses repeated interactions between a firm and an inspector who monitors regulatory compliance. The firm may offer a bribe to pre‐empt the inspection. Corruption is unfeasible in the one‐shot game because of inspector hold‐up. In an infinitely repeated game, we characterize the set of bribes that can be sustained as equilibrium paths using the trigger strategy. In this model, the most likely bribe‐givers are not the firms that benefit the most from the illegal behaviour. Furthermore, strengthening anti‐corruption policies has ambiguous welfare effects because it improves compliance only among a subset of firms, and increases monitoring effort.