,Summary Globalisation & Crime 3rd edition
Aas (2013) – Globalisation & Crime Chapter 1; Crime, Fear and Social Exclusion in the
Global Village
Globalisation (Held): the growing interconnectedness of states and societies and the
progressive enmeshment of human communities with each other. Over the last few
centuries, human communities have come into increasing contact with each other; their
collective fortunes have become intertwined.
A vital aspect of the globalizing process is therefore the movement of cultural images,
information and ideas, which enable us to visit – physically or virtually – distant places almost
anywhere in the world.
Glocalisation (Robertson): term to describe the intertwining of the global and the local.
Global flows traverse national boundaries, creating a constant flux between the inside and
the outside, resulting in hybridity of what before appeared to be relatively stable entities.
Increasingly, the boundaries between the inside and the outside are being blurred, and we
are faced with the question of how to deal with the constant influx of sometimes unfamiliar
and undesirable people, ideas, images, objects and activities, in our midst. The meanings of
home, community, nation and citizenship become transformed beyond recognition by the
global, creating hybrid identities and glocal belongings.
➔ A Global perspective can be seen as an encouragement to transcend boundaries and
to expand the territorial as well as thematic score of conventional criminology.
Ontological insecurity: ontological insecurity refers to a lack of confidence that most human
beings have in their self- identity and the constancy of the surrounding social and material
environments of action.
This chapter had provides an outline of discussions about the numerous and contested
meaning of globalisation. For the purpose of this boos, we shall consider globalisation simply
as the manifold process of increasing transnational interconnectedness of societies.
Globalisation is not a historically new phenomenon, although it has gained powerful
momentum with the progressive development of global capitalism, information and
communication technologies, patterns of mobility and cultural exchange.
Five aspects of global transformations were given particular consideration, as they inform our
further discussions in this book
1. Disembedding of social relations refers to a process described by Giddens as a
general trait of modernity, by which social practices are ordered across space and
time. The social space is no longer limited to the boundaries of physical space.
Globalisation intensifies the stretching of social relations across time and space at
times creating an impression of world as a ‘global village’ (time space
compression).
2. The role of the modern nation state is fundamentally transformed under the influence
of global transformations. Some commentators have described the development as
the withering of the state. When it comes to the governance of crime and security, the
picture is far more complex and contradictory. The abdication of state responsibility in
some areas goes hand in hand with increased state surveillance and the expansion of
the criminal justice and prison systems.
3. Global inequality is a pervasive trait of the contemporary world order, which is
magnified by the globalization of media and consumer culture. The global ‘have nots’
are incessantly bombarded with images of the lifestyle of the privileged. The
development has been analyzed as conducive to crime and deviance, due to the
increasing feelings of relative deprivation, social exclusion, disintegration of
communal life and value systems.
4. The topic of the risk society marks a progressive shift in social organization towards
the management and neutralization of various types of risk, rather than the
achievement of more positive goals of social justice. Risk societies are prone to be
, scapegoat societies: this is particularly visible when it comes to political and media
discourses about crime and punishment.
- Risk societies: we are living in risk societies who constantly debating, managing
and preventing risk they have themselves produced. In risk societies social
inequality is individualized, and the focus is on fear and safety rather than on
issues of class and social justice.
5. The contested nature of the concept of crime is not an objective quality, but
depends on a series of political, historic and social processes which lead to
criminalization. Globalization had been a breeding ground for the new forms of
criminalization that will be discussed throughout this book, such as criminalization of
various aspects of migration, global resistance and Internet-related behavior.
Swaaningen (2010) – Critical Cosmopolitanism and Global Criminology
In the early years of criminology, comparative criminology was quite common. But
paradoxically, the more established criminology gets as a discipline, the more a national
orientation comes to prevail (it became a policy-oriented discipline).
Over the last two decades we can, however, observe a renewed interest in international
themes in criminology. We can still observe a growing nationalism, in which the implicit idea
that foreigners mean nothing else than trouble seems to prevail. From the 1990s on,
following the trend in sociology, the theme of globalisation has slowly entered criminology. In
this very same era, international - mainly - EU police and legal cooperation increased and,
mainly because of the EU wide restrictions set to migration, we came to speak about
‘Fortress Europe’. Irregular migration has been a central field of criminological research
since the early years of the Chicago School, but it can well be argued that around the 1990s,
when multiculturalism came under pressure in many European countries, this too triggered
more comparative research. Several authors also point at the recent genocides in Bosnia
and Rwanda by the end of the twentieth century and the human disasters in Darfur and the
war in Iraq in the new millennium, and the subsequent tribunals and committees of inquiry
that were established in this respect, as a new impetus for a supranational criminology.
Ways of comparing
Comparative criminological research is done in many different ways. It varies from meta-level
studies in which existing literature on a certain theme from different countries is combined, to
parallel studies in which the same research design is applied to a similar theme in two or
three different countries to in-depth case studies in another country.
Comparative criminologists also use a variety of research methods:
1. Descriptive studies are probably the most common. They are carried out because we
want to know where our own country stands internationally. Most comparisons
between different legal systems also follow the descriptive tradition. The main
limitation is that the data is mostly isolated from the political, social and cultural
context in which the phenomena under study are embedded. So the why question
cannot be answered.
2. Policy-oriented studies aim to learn something from other countries and see whether
their ‘best practices’ can be implemented in one’s own country.
3. Interpretative comparative cultural studies
There are basically three reasons why a ‘global’ criminology is emerging.
1. Because the power-balance in the world is changing rapidly, we need to look beyond
Western models of thought in order to understand the changes that occur.
2. The whole idea of the ‘nation state’ and state sovereignty has got under pressure in the
process of globalisation.
3. We face criminological problems that cannot be analyzed from a traditional inter- or
transnational comparative perspective, because their scope and effect is truly global.
According to Zygmunt Bauman, globalisation is a major reason why questions of identity
have become so important again in sociology - and obviously in the social reality too.
Globalisation has put the idea of ‘who we are’ so much under pressure that ‘we’ increasingly
