Theoretical Criminology

This article argues that criminology has not moved sufficiently from the construction of a series of different `others', towards an epistemology of diversity. The emerging theory of cosmopolitanism is advocated as more consistent with the empirical realities of diversity and globalization than the identity/difference logic of modernity. Cosmopolitanism emphasizes the universality of rights because of humans' common possession of the earth, and proposes the grounding of justice on the need to respond to strangers without hostility. As well as this normative cosmopolitanism, methodological cosmopolitanism has been espoused in recent works by Ulrich Beck and Paul Gilroy. This methodological cosmopolitanism, it is argued, can yield valuable insights into diversity and its implications in single societies and in the globalized world.

White ethnicity is generally invisible and unexamined in racism, crime and justice debates. Serving mostly as a default comparator to describe visible minority experiences of crime and criminal justice processes, white ethnicity is seen as unproblematic as an ethnicity except as a potential source of racism. This article draws on aspects of `whiteness studies' in the USA and UK—focusing on marginalized white ethnicities—to explore racialized `white' ethnicity, both historically and today. Designations such as white `underclass', `new' migrants, `white trash' are offered to show that some whites are seen as `less white' than others within a hierarchy of `whiteness'. The article concludes that racism and classism towards marginalized white working-class ethnicities have criminalized these groups in ways not too dissimilar from the criminalization of visible working-class minorities.

This article explores the situated nature of male prisoner identities in the late modern British context, using the contrasting theoretical frames of Sykes's (1958) indigenous model and Jacobs' (1979) importation model of prisoner subcultures and social relations. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in an ethnically, religiously and nationally diverse young offenders institution, consideration is given to how prisoners manage and negotiate difference, exploring the contours of racialization and racism which can operate in ambiguous and contradictory ways. Sociological understandings of identity, ethnicity, racialization and racism are used to inform a more empirically grounded theoretical criminology.

In this article, we hypothesize that the punitive and disciplinary dimensions of the private security industry reflect and propagate a peculiar and practically alarming story about human security: that it is possible to pursue a form of individualized political peace nearly apart from broader projects for social and economic peace. We reflect upon the impacts for different `racial' groups of the continued currency of this story for human security. We probe these developing hypotheses through the empirical case of South Africa. Toward framing this form of analysis, we elaborate upon controversies concerning the combination of Foucauldian analyses with political economic and realist critical race approaches, to yield critical sociologies of political economy.

Attempts by governments to control unwanted border crossings are a defining feature of late modernity; but the suppression of cross-border mobility is not new. In pre-industrial England the `masterless men' and `valiant beggars' were subjected to harsh measures designed to curtail their mobility. In this article, we observe that border control intensifies at times of tumultuous structural change when institutions capable of preserving the emerging economic and social order are largely absent. In a globally mobile society, we argue that `flawed consumers' and `suspect citizens' are the most likely to be earmarked for exclusion. This designation links historical conceptions of `the other' with the tropes of race, class and foreignness to underpin contemporary xeno-racism.

This article discusses how the normalization of emergency penality, together with the rise of neoliberalism in the Colombian political and economic fields during the last decade, has given rise to authoritarian liberalism—a political model which encourages the hypertrophy of the penal state and the reduction of the social state. Colombian ethnic minorities, the indigenous and black populations, have suffered disproportionately from social exclusion and political violence, becoming victims, not only of illegal armed actors, but also of the punitive policies of Colombian governments. The normalization of emergency penality and the predominance of authoritarian liberalism are by no means peculiarities of the Colombian context, but the manifestation—in rather extreme circumstances—of a global trend that deploys punishment to uphold neoliberalism.