Dr Fabian Zhilla

The Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London

Fabian Zhilla joined King’s College Law School to commence his MPhil/PhD program in September 2008 and was advanced to PhD student status in July 2009. Fabian has been awarded the prestigious Chevening Scholarship by the British Council; USAID East Central Europe Visiting Scholarship; and the Soros Foundation Open Society Scholarship for his studies. Fabian Zhilla comes to King’s with an LLB degree from University of Tirana Faculty of Law and an LLM from London Metropolitan University. He has been Visiting Scholar in Public Administration at George Washington University and Visiting Scholar in Economic Crime and Corruption at Georgetown University. Fabian’s project is supervised by Dr. Mary Vogel and Professor Penny Green. His thesis is titled “Organised Crime and Judicial Corruption: Democratic Transformation and Prospects for Justice in the Western Balkans”.

Research

Research interests include: corruption, organised crime, economic crime and governance in post communist societies generally and the Western Balkans more specifically. Doctoral thesis analyses the roots of judicial corruption in Albania and the Western Balkans and considers why reforms are not yielding more concrete results. It explores the generating circumstances of judicial corruption, its dynamics and its interplay with organised crime. It attempts to theorise some of the contextually necessary conditions for the rule of law. This work has been presented at: British Society of Criminology Annual Conference 2009, Cardiff; and Post-Graduate Student Conference of Criminology, Oxford University 2009. The author also participated in the Secretariat for the Twenty-Seventh International Symposium on Economic Crime, University of Cambridge.