International and comparative criminal justice and urban governance

Abstract

Introduction The power to define acts as crimes and the institutionalisation of processes of criminalisation are intimately bound up with the law-making power and identity of the nation state. Similarly, the ability to enforce criminal norms through coercion is equally entwined with the state's claim to sovereignty and its monopoly over the use of legitimate force. Consequently, criminal law and criminal justice represent pre-eminent and central symbols of state sovereignty, and claims over the state's capacity to regulate populations and activities within the confines of its territorial borders. Crime control, therefore, is intrinsically tied up with questions of national identity and self-characterisation. It is infused with, and reflects, the moral, cultural and political frames of reference that inform a society and constitute membership (i.e. citizenship) for given peoples within specified geographical boundaries. Increasingly in recent years, the capacities, competencies and legitimation claims of the nation state have been called into question – in the field of crime and social control as elsewhere. ‘Fluidity’, ‘liquidity’ and ‘movement’ appear as the defining characteristics of the contemporary age (Lash and Urry 1994; Bauman 2000; Castells 2000). In the modern era, people, goods, capital, technologies, information and communications, as well as ‘risks’, appear to be on the move in ways that cut across territorial boundaries and question the capability of the state as the ultimate ‘power-container’.

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