Anja Shortland is a Professor in Political Economy at King’s College London. She studied Engineering Science at Oxford and for her MSc in Political Economy and PhD in International Relations at the London School of Economics. Anja specialises in institutional economics and the economics of crime. Her research is on private ordering in the world’s trickiest markets: hostages, hijacked ships, stolen art, ransomware and protection for criminalised minorities. She is particularly interested in the surprisingly orderly trades between legal and illegal enterprises in extortive crime and the norms, processes and institutions that govern this challenging economic grey zone.

Anja latest book: Dark Screens: heroes and hackers in the shadowy world of ransomware was released by Public Affairs in April 2026.