In terms of its disruptive impact and intensity of violence, banditry is the gravest security threat that Nigeria currently faces, and it is driving her worst national humanitarian crisis in decades. There are contests about the origin, nature and the drivers of banditry and how well bandits by their modus operandi fit into the various definitional frameworks of an organized criminal group. The article examines what is known about bandits and banditry in light of existing definitional and conceptual paradigms of organized crime and criminal groups, and interrogates the applicability of international humanitarian law to this security crisis that characterizes the current face of conflict in the West African Sahel.

This article examines banditry, embezzlement, and other insider crimes along Egyptian railway lines during a period when British officials exerted centralized control over the Egyptian railway and financial austerity had a negative impact on the rail sector. By exploring the motives and tactics of railway crimes, I posit that criminals, by making claims on and use of the technology outside the purview of state regulations, expressed their heterogeneous desires to redistribute social wealth, repurpose the technological promise of modern railways, and confound intentions of colonial governance. Using new archival materials, this article utilizes a bottom-up approach to examine grassroots activism, everyday knowledge, informal networks, and the social mores and norms that criminals harnessed to discern infrastructural vulnerabilities and elude surveillance from the colonial state. Ultimately, I contend that criminal acts uncovered social crises otherwise hidden under the shadow of the exterior prosperity and stability of late 19th-century Egypt.

The purpose of this paper is to provide further understanding into the structure of the sequential allocation (“stochastic multi-armed bandit”) problem by establishing probability one finite horizon bounds and convergence rates for the sample regret associated with two simple classes of allocation policies. For any slowly increasing function g, subject to mild regularity constraints, we construct two policies (the g-Forcing, and the g-Inflated Sample Mean) that achieve a measure of regret of order O(g(n)) almost surely as n → ∞, bound from above and below. Additionally, almost sure upper and lower bounds on the remainder term are established. In the constructions herein, the function g effectively controls the “exploration” of the classical “exploration/exploitation” tradeoff.