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The Glass is at Least Half Full: Reflections on the Internationalization of Criminology

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Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to offer reflections on the extent to which and the ways in which the production of criminological knowledge has (or has not) become more “international.” With respect to extent, I review previous work that has searched for evidence of internationalization by means of content analyses of criminological scholarship and by inquiries into the membership on editorial boards of journals. I build upon these studies by reporting original evidence on internationalization as reflected in the publications appearing in Criminology, the journal of the American Society of Criminology, over the course of the current century. With respect to the ways in which internationalization has unfolded, I review some of the comparative research that has been directed towards assessing the applicability of criminological theories developed in the West to the context of East Asian societies. I conclude with brief remarks about the internationalization of criminology in the future.

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Notes

  1. The literal meaning of “internationalization” is quite broad and rather vague. A dictionary definition of “internationalize” is “to make international” (Merriam Webster 2020). For purposes of this essay, I interpret “internationalization” as referring to the growth of research that is explicitly concerned with the implications of the analyses beyond a single nation, as well as the expansion of transnational partnerships in the production of knowledge. Feraldo-Cabana and Lamela (2019) adopted a similar conceptualization of internationalization in their analyses of international journals, as discussed below. See Barberet (2007) for a discussion of the distinctions between “international” and “comparative” research, and Bennett (2004) for a general typology of “comparative research.”

  2. See Barberet (2007, p. 415) for a more detailed, 12-category classification based on data source and authors’ affiliations.

  3. These analyses are intended to indicate the overall representation of transnational collaborations and are thus based on all articles in the sample. Sole-authored articles cannot of course entail transnational collaboration or any collaboration. If the sample is limited to articles with coauthors, the patterns are similar to those reported above.

  4. See Agnew (2015) for a comprehensive review of this literature. My summary of the comparative research on GST relies heavily on this secondary source, wherein extensive citations to the original studies are provided.

  5. For examples of research assessing the generalizability of routine activities based on macro-level analyses with multinational samples, see Bennett (1991) and Anderson Bennett (1996). These studies reported that the relationships between structural characteristics indicating routine activities and crime rates varied by levels of development. See Stein (2010) for an example of a study assessing the generalizability of routine activities theory in multilevel analyzes of data for a cross-national sample.

  6. See also Gerstner et al. (2019). Based on analyses of data from Australia and Germany, they found differences in the influences of neighborhood structural characteristics on levels of collective efficacy, underscoring the importance of attending to the “embeddedess” of the local social processes of collective efficacy within the larger macro social context (Gerstner et al., 2019:1171).

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Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Chin-han Chan for assistance with the content analysis. I also extend my thanks to Glenn Deane and Robert Agnew for reviewing earlier drafts of the manuscript.

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This research has not been supported by any funding agency.

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  1. University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), New York, USA

    Steven F. Messner

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Correspondence to Steven F. Messner.

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Messner, S.F. The Glass is at Least Half Full: Reflections on the Internationalization of Criminology. Int Criminol 1, 13–19 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43576-020-00001-y

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