Spirits of Governance is an attempt to make something of 17 years of academic study – 5 of those years spent working hard on a PhD that would eventually end up getting shelved (more on that later).

Content-wise, this site will be helpful for researchers and policy-makers concerned with controlling the illicit traffic in cultural objects as it is an attempt to make sense of some of the more murky aspects of the international trade and its subsequent control and governance. This site may also prove useful for researchers and policy-makers who are not specifically concerned with the international trade in cultural objects per se, but with other international crime problems and their subsequent governance and control.

This was supposed to be a PhD dissertation, but considering the circumstances (I have no institutional affiliation and no access to library materials and don’t really care about academia anymore), this site will likely be a series of little articles about my data written in a journalistic style. Because I currently have no institutional affiliation and as such do not have access to library materials, references and citations as a whole may be scarce in some places and nonexistent in others.

My name is Jessica Dietzler. This is my work. Welcome to my lair.