Theoretical Criminology 15(1)

Questions of security: A framework for research
Mariana Valverde

Scholars have noted that we are increasingly being governed in the name of security, in literature that usually treats security as an entity in need of a theory. This article begins by noting that ‘security’ does not need theories, but rather questions that can generate concrete analyses. Three sets of questions are elaborated here. The first concerns the logics of security projects. The second set raises questions of scale and jurisdiction. Finally, governance projects are distinguished by the techniques used. This set of questions about security—which, this article argues, always need to be posed in relation to specific security projects—is a theoretically significant revision of the governmentality literature’s distinction between rationalities and technologies of governance.

‘Trial by media’: Policing, the 24-7 news mediasphere and the ‘politics of outrage’
Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin

This article analyses the changing nature of news media—police chief relations. Building on previous research (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010), we use the concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) to examine former Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’. We focus on the collective and overwhelmingly hostile journalistic reaction to Blair’s declaration in 2005 that: (a) the news media are guilty of ‘institutional racism’ in their coverage of murders; and (b) the murders of two 10-year-olds in Soham, 2001, received undue levels of media attention. A sustained period of symbolic media annihilation in the British mainstream press established a dominant ‘inferential structure’ that defined Blair as the ‘gaffe-prone Commissioner’: his position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ was shredded, and his Commissionership de-legitimized. The unprecedented resignation of an MPS Commissioner is situated within the wider context of ‘attack journalism’ and the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’.

Politics in Foucault’s later work: A philosophy of truth; or reformism in question
Veronique Voruz

Drawing on Foucault’s late seminars this article contrasts political reformism, favoured in the English-speaking tradition of ‘Foucauldian’ criminology, with Foucault’s own ‘return’ to philosophy. Of late, given the relative failure of ‘histories of the present’ to produce effects of resistance, the very usefulness of a Foucauldian framework for criminologists has been called into question. But in his final work Foucault envisaged a different instrumentality for philosophy as ‘the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself ’. In this perspective, the genealogical method appears more clearly as a mode of resistance to political power, and above all as a modality of the relation of self to self among others explored by Foucault in his last work.

Rape, love and war-personal or political?
Kjersti Ericsson

This article discusses how war rapes and consensual sexual relationships with enemy soldiers are framed and understood, with special emphasis on the consequences for the women involved. It war rapes in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Balkan war and Danish and Norwegian women’s sexual relationships with German occupant soldiers during the Second World War. I argue that the conception of women’s sexuality as national property is central to understanding the attitudes towards both categories of women. To preserve their dignity, war rape victims may profit from a collective, political discourse. Women having had consensual relationships to enemy soldiers, however, have to extricate themselves from the collective and political discourse and interpret what happened to them as strictly personal.

Old theories and new approaches: Evaluating Freda Adler’s theory of low crime and its implications for criminology
Amy E. Nivette

Many years ago, Freda Adler (1983) sought to explain the full variation of crime rates through the notion of synnomie. Although Adler’s research was incomplete and somewhat flawed, it drew attention to low crime societies as the subject of criminological research. In this article I critically revisit Adler’s ideas in order to encourage a more methodologically rigorous approach to researching low crime societies. The main issues this article addresses are the assumption of ‘low’ crime and the meaning this label entails, the implications of ‘norm cohesion’ and the need for an alternative approach when studying ‘low’ crime. I conclude with implications for criminological research in the hope that this will invite future inquiry into matters that lie outside the traditional criminological gaze.

Theoretical Criminology, February 2011: Volume 15, Issue 1