Jarrett Blaustein

Policing for democracy or democratically responsive policing? Examining the limits of externally driven police reform

This paper engages with literatures on democratic policing in established and emerging democracies and argues for disaggregating democratic policing into two more precise terms: policing for democracy and democratically responsive policing. The first term captures the contribution of police to securing and maintaining wider democratic forms of government, while the second draws on political theory to emphasize arrangements for governing police actors based on responsiveness. Applying two distinct terms helps to highlight limitations to external police assistance. The terms are applied in an exploratory case study of 15 years of police reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The paper highlights early work securing the necessary conditions for political democracy in BiH but argues that subsequent interventions dominated by the European Union undermine responsiveness. A recent United Nations Development Programme project suggests that external actors can succeed in supporting democratically responsive policing where they do not have immediate security interests at stake.

Exporting criminological innovation abroad: Discursive representation, ‘evidence-based crime prevention’ and the post-neoliberal development agenda in Latin America

The aim of this article is to stimulate a critical dialogue about the implications of northern criminologists working to promote their research abroad. It accounts for why attempts to generate impact on an international scale may prove problematic and illustrates potential pitfalls by analysing the content and discourses featured in a toolkit for evidence-based crime prevention developed for the Inter-American Development Bank in 2012. The example prompts important and timely questions about the practical and discursive implications of northern attempts to influence policy and practice in the South. The article concludes by accounting for the importance of reflexivity as a strategy for limiting this harm-generating potential and for fostering discursively representative policy deliberations.

Reflexivity and participatory policy ethnography: situating the self in a transnational criminology of harm production

The concept of reflexivity is central to research that aspires to interpret and reconstruct global, comparative and transnational dimensions of crime and its control. It is crucial for understanding how and why criminal justice policies travel between contexts and for interrogating the motives and the interests of the agents and the institutions which facilitate these ‘policy transfers’ Qones and Newburn 2007). Reflexivity in the context of global criminology can be understood as the idea that ‘[t]here is no one-way street between the researcher and the object of study; rather, the two affect each other mutually and continually in the course of the research process’ (Alvesson and Skoldberg 2009, 79). The reflexive praxis described by Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009) holds important methodological implications for criminologists who are interested in studying globalisation ‘as an interactive rather than a hegemonic process’ (Cain 2000), in other words, a process that is continuously shaped by local and global forces. The concept is therefore crucial for understanding how globalisation facilitates the diffusion of ‘Western’ mentalities of crime and punishment throughout the Global South (see Chan 2005) and it provides a vehicle for working towards the actualisation of what Bowling (2011, 374 original emphasis) describes as ‘a criminology of harm production emphasizing the role of the discipline in documenting the harms produced by global crime control practices and the role of criminologists in speaking truth to power…’.

Ethical Criminologists Fly Economy: Process-oriented Criminological Engagement ‘Abroad’

Criminology has developed into a transnational discipline (Aas 2011; Aas 2012) and many criminologists, particularly those working at universities based in the ‘Global North’, increasingly find themselves engaging with policy makers and practitioners from different jurisdictions. They are sometimes approached for their topical and methodological expertise and the proactive among them work to situate themselves in transnational policy communities that allow them to maximise their research impact. They may feel prompted to engage in this manner by a combination of idealistic and opportunistic factors yet most criminologists also recognise that these activities can generate unanticipated harms. These harms can be understood in relation to their criminological, cultural and social consequences for recipient societies (see Bowling 2011; Blaustein 2014a) and, the disempowerment or marginalisation of alternative understandings of the criminal question. The implication is that there are many pitfalls awaiting Northern criminologists undertaking or promoting their research abroad; however, this chapter proposes that it may still be possible to do so in an ethical and potentially beneficial manner.

Impact and the Reflexive Imperative in Criminal Justice Policy, Practice and Research

This volume grows out of two parallel but distinct developments in social science research that affect the way researchers study and seek to have an impact in the areas of crime and criminal justice. These are the increasing acceptance and practice of (some form of) reflexivity in social science research, on the one hand, and, on the other, the changing context of research itself. On the latter point, we note that criminologists working across different jurisdictions are experiencing heightened pressures to render their research relevant and appealing to external audiences. These pressures are linked in part with the fact that governments in Australia, the UK and the USA (along with other countries) are increasingly keen to ensure that their investment in the higher education sector is delivering ‘value for money’. This implies that research and teaching activities that are government-funded must increasingly align with, or at least demonstrate alignment with, what these governments define as the public interest. In Australia, for example, the Australian Research Council, which is responsible for administering public research funding, has identified a list of nine strategic ‘Science and Research Priorities’ to organise funding of ‘support for science and research on the most important challenges facing Australia’ (developed partly from a 2014 white paper ‘Boosting the commercial returns of research’; see ARC 2016). With the possible exception of ‘cybersecurity’, none of these strategic priorities appear to be directly relevant to criminology or indeed, the social sciences. The specified research priorities relate primarily to what are known as ‘STEM’ subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine), thereby prioritising an increasingly narrow set of subjects and research methodologies that reflect a pragmatic and in our view myopic governmental understanding of what constitutes societal value.

Reflexivity and Criminal Justice: Intersections of Policy, Practice and Research

This collection presents a diverse set of case studies and theoretical reflections on how criminologists engage with practitioners and policy makers while undertaking research. The contributions to this volume highlight both the challenges and opportunities associated with doing criminological research in a reflexive and collaborative manner. They further examine the ethical and practical implications of the ‘impact’ agenda in the higher education sector with respect to the production and the dissemination of criminological knowledge. Developed to serve as an internationally accessible reference volume for scholars, practitioners and postgraduate criminology students, this book responds to the awareness that criminology as a discipline increasingly encompasses not only the study of crime, but also the agencies, process and structures that regulate it. Key questions include: How can criminal justice policy be studied as part of the field of criminology? How do we account for our own roles as researchers who are a part of the policy process? What factors and dynamics influence, hinder and facilitate ‘good policy’?

Crime and Development in the Global South

This chapter revisits the literature on the relationship between crime and development in the global South. It begins by examining the Modernization Thesis which posits that crime is a consequence of economic development. The chapter then proceeds to examine critical arguments concerning the relationship between development and crime. It is argued that both perspectives are helpful for illuminating the criminogenic consequences of economic development but are also theoretically problematic due to their universalizing tendencies. Accordingly, the chapter concludes by highlighting the need for more localized studies of the relationship between crime and development and research that accounts for how criminological issues influence the work of the international development community in the global South today.

Policy mobilities and comparative penality

The study of ‘policy transfer’ has been subject to sustained criticism, in particular by critical policy studies scholars. This critique—together with the rather marginal role that policy transfer research has played in criminological debates to date—raises questions about the continued utility of such research in scholarly discussions of crime control and penal policy-making. However, we argue here that such studies can enhance our understanding of the local, national and global influences over crime control policy formation. In particular, the developing interest in comparative criminology, in the political economy of punishment, and in the ‘proximate causes’ of penal change, are all areas to which this work can make a useful contribution. Although we feel that some elements of the critique are over-stated, the critical policy studies notions of ‘mobilities’ and ‘assemblages’ offer important advances that capture more fully the complexities of the processes involved in the cross-national movement of penal policy.