Theoretical Criminology 17(2)

Theoretical Criminology, May 2013: Volume 17, Issue 2

Special Issue: Crime and Control in Asia

Doing criminology from the periphery: Crime and punishment in Asia
Maggy Lee and Karen Joe Laidler

In responding to the rallying call to expand criminology’s geopolitical imagination and to ‘see from the peripheries’ (Aas, 2012: 11), this Special Issue takes East and South-East Asia as the point of departure and showcases criminological work undertaken in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan. 

Articles

Colonial responses to youth crime in Hong Kong: Penal elitism, legitimacy and citizenship
Michael Adorjan and Wing Hong Chui

This article examines colonial responses to youth crime in Hong Kong, focusing on the 1960s, when riots involving large numbers of youth drew concern among officials over spillover from the Cultural Revolution in Mainland China; and on the 1970s, when the Government initiated a program of state building focused on instilling citizen identification with Hong Kong, youth in particular. Elite reaction is examined through a series of Legislative Council debates, declassified official reports and governmental Annual Reports. The article argues that youth crime control in Hong Kong’s colonial context could best be understood using a penal elitist framework, one which remains influential today.

Consuming private security: Consumer citizenship and defensive urbanism in Singapore
Choon-Piew Pow

Recent scholarship in criminology has suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of an uneven patchwork of urban policing and security provision, increasingly determined by the ability and willingness of consumers to pay for private security goods and services. In particular, it has been argued that the commodification of urban policing and private security has given rise to new forms of ‘consumer citizenship’ and identity and alongside these, the creation of new secured spaces of consumption. This article seeks to examine one specific manifestation of such a security product—the gated community. While the proliferation of gated communities and the frantic construction of such ‘architecture of fear’ (Ellin, 1997) have often been associated with an American-style ‘defensive urbanism’, the emergence of such security-enhanced urban landscapes is invariably time and place specific. Using the context of Singapore, a city-state with strong state control and relatively low crime rate, the article traces the development of such enclosed residential enclaves to show how the rise of private policing and security are bound up in the creation of fortified residential spaces in which an exclusive social-spatial order comes to be defined and enforced.

Networked regulation as a solution to human rights abuse in global supply chains? The case of trade union rights violations by Indonesian sports shoe manufacturers
Tim Connor and Fiona Haines

This article analyses the capacity of global networks of civil society actors to supplement effectively weak state regulation in reducing human rights abuse by multi-national companies (MNCs). The effectiveness of non-government organizations as part of a network of control finds support both in the radical criminological literature as well as those explicitly advocating for a networked regulatory approach. This case study of the Indonesian sport shoe industry demonstrates that networked regulation has had a positive short- to medium-term impact on respect for trade union rights among some manufacturers producing for western MNCs. However, inconsistent approaches by the MNCs and ongoing resistance by manufacturers has made this influence difficult to sustain. Critically, the Indonesian state apparatus emerges as a powerful and primarily—but far from completely—complicit set of actors: applying criminal sanctions for trade union rights violations but failing to enforce them, and influencing networked regulation in complex, contingent ways. This case study suggests both that advocates and practitioners of networked regulation need to find more effective ways to respond to the corporate drive to maximize profit and that networked regulation’s long-term usefulness will likely depend on the extent to which it draws from and operates to strengthen progressive regulatory elements within Asian states.

'Penal populism' and penological change in contemporary Japan
Mark Fenwick

This article examines whether the concept of penal populism can be useful in understanding contemporary developments in Japanese criminal justice. In addressing this issue it is suggested that we need to draw a clear distinction between different conceptions of penal populism and, in particular, we should avoid equating penal populism with intensification of the severity of state punishment. A discussion of the Japanese experience highlights the importance of focusing on populism as a process by which new voices emerge and influence criminal justice policy as a result of an unmet demand for justice and security. This perception of a lack of security and justice is a global phenomenon that, nevertheless, expresses itself in distinctive, culturally specific ways. Although the extent of this shift should not be exaggerated, at least in a Japanese context, penal populism has contributed to an opening up of criminal justice and a disaggregation of state sovereignty.

Capital punishment in China: A populist instrument of social governance
Michelle Miao

Contrary to the assumption that authoritarian authorities are insensitive to popular demands for justice, the Chinese penal regime has been highly attentive and responsive to public sentiments since its early days. As an instrument for the authorities to govern the country in the name of the people, capital punishment functioned as a tool for political struggles in Maoist China and later served as a tool to fight crimes in Deng’s reform era. Nowadays, the demands of the masses for revenge, justice and equality have been translated into a fervent passion for capital punishment for certain offences and offenders. By reaching out to satisfy these public demands and sentiments, the party-state hopes to enhance its political legitimacy. In this sense, the death penalty serves as a populist mechanism to strengthen the resilience of the authoritarian party-state by venting public anxiety and resentment towards social problems created in the processes of China’s rapid modernization and social fragmentation.

Research Notes

Ethnography at the periphery: Redrawing the borders of criminology's world-map
Alistair Fraser

In the current era of globalization, a paradox has developed in the field of criminology. In the context of the increasingly global nature of crime, there has been a firm recognition among criminologists of the need for comparative, transnational research; particularly that which moves beyond knowledge created in the global North. However, production of this knowledge remains clustered in a relatively narrow range of geographical sites—and understandings of crime and criminology in the South too often defined through the lens of the North. As processes of globalization confound and disrupt the traditional dualisms of East/West and North/South, there is a pressing need for an expansion of criminology’s world-map. This article explores the conceptual possibilities of one particular methodology—ethnography—as a means of explicating the deep-seated tensions, fragmented realities and hybridized identities that emerge from the margins of globalization. Drawing on cogent debates from the fields of sociology and anthropology, I argue that ethnographically informed ‘theory from the South’ can at once enrich the criminological imagination and provoke a more cosmopolitan global imaginary.

The hukou and traditional virtue: An ethnographic note on Taiwanese policing
Jeffrey T Martin

This research note suggests that traditional ideals of virtue in Taiwan enable an order-making dynamic to operate in the backstage of state record-keeping processes. These virtues coordinate cooperation by policemen, civilians and politically empowered elites, simultaneously facilitating local order-maintenance and ensuring that police records serve the interests of the established political economic structure. I focus on the ways that this arrangement is grounded in the historical institution of the population registry, or hukou. I argue that Taiwan’s hukou has effectively translated traditional virtues into policeable objects of modern administration: inscribed in the documentary practices of population registration, embedded in a naturalized division of social control labor, and institutionalized as collective habits of response to trouble.

Doing criminological ethnography in China: Opportunities and challenges
Jianhua Xu, Karen Joe Laidler, and Maggy Lee

This article reflects on the emerging criminological research enterprise in China. We provide a brief overview on the nature of criminological knowledge production in China, particularly in relation to practical and political constraints. We contend that while there are distinct challenges associated with doing criminology in China, there are also new possibilities for alternative methodologies and critical analyses to push the boundaries of administrative criminology. Through the example of a study of migrants and motorcycle taxi driving in a Chinese city, we argue that an ethnography of the periphery can facilitate our understanding of the nuances of the social and cultural construction of the migrant crime problem, bringing to the foreground globally as well as locally relevant tensions, fragmented realities and hybridized identities.