Introduction

International Criminology launches at what may come to be regarded as a pivotal moment in international relations. COVID-19 is widely interpreted as having triggered a major reconfiguration of core facets of international connectivity across the globe, insofar as it has reshaped the mobility of humans, commodities, institutions, and communications (Steger & James, 2020). At a time of growing nationalism in political arenas around the world (Walter, 2021), the spread of the virus from late 2019 onwards has been a stark reminder of the significance of cross-national flows to societies and their economies, whether in terms of the health risks of viral transmission through human movement across borders, vulnerability to financial losses caused by the accelerated decoupling of global supply chains and service flows, or the expansion of ‘disembodied’, digitised forms of interactions. The pandemic has gone on to exacerbate high levels of inequality within some of the world’s leading economies (Wildman, 2021), and looks set to provoke significant increase in rates of poverty in weaker economies, where unemployment has surged in sectors affected by the disruption of global value chains (Valensisi, 2020; see also Ortiz-Juarez et al., 2020). Behind these developments has been the ongoing transformation of political systems across the international arena; that is, the ‘global democratic recession’ that began in 2006 and has since gathered pace, shrinking the number of the world’s democracies, and contracting the political rights and civil liberties of citizens in growing numbers of states (Diamond, 2021).

To explore what relevance these broader pressures may have for the field of international criminology, this article takes as its starting point the contingency of disciplinary development, and in this context reflects on the distinctive features and contributions of contemporary international criminology. The article goes on to consider the refraction of the above pressures through the prism of four specific challenges that are set to face the field of international criminology in the coming years. First, obstacles relating to the production, availability, and interpretation of pertinent data across jurisdictions internationally. Second, contrary pressures towards, on the one hand, greater criminalisation of phenomena deemed to be social harms, and on the other hand, the decriminalisation and cross-sectoral management, of such phenomena by agents and institutions beyond the ‘law and order’ arena. Third, international disparities in academic freedoms. And fourth, growing resistance to international institutions, law and ‘elites’.

The Distinctiveness of Contemporary International Criminology: Diversity and Radical Critique

In assessing the prospects of international criminology given the wider state of flux in societies and economies across the world, it is helpful to take a look back at how broader socio-economic and political transformations have already shaped the field. The rise of international criminology over recent decades has shadowed a more general growth in public and scholarly recognition of, and interest in, the complex ‘international connectivity’ of societies and economies across the globe that gathered momentum from the 1960s onwards and grew exponentially with the rise of the digital era and the end of the Cold War (Nederveen Pieterse, 2020, 2021).

But expanding criminological recognition of, and interest in, the international dimensions of crime and crime control—from the cross-national similarities and differences of crime trends and criminal justice policies, to the transnational flows of criminal trade, to inter-governmental criminal justice initiatives and institutions—has had its precedents. As historical criminological accounts have underscored, these themes have previously attracted considerable public and scholarly attention, the period prior and in the lead up to the First World War offering one notable example (Knepper, 2009; see further Melossi et al., 2011). Indeed, the emergence of criminology as an academic discipline occurred at a time in which concerns about the way that new transport and communication technologies might be facilitating ‘alien criminality’, ‘white slavery’ and transnational political violence, were all prominent in public debate. Criminologists of the time also displayed considerable commitment to sharing and comparing their findings with one another as part of an international project to advance the development of a coherent, ‘scientific’ body of knowledge (Knepper, 2009; Kaluszynski, 2006).

More so than the parallels between periods when societies and scholars find international dimensions of social problems and associated counter-efforts a compelling subject for scrutiny, however, it is differences in the focus and approach accorded to the ‘international’ as an analytic category over time and space that are especially suggestive of the ways in which major exogenous upheavals can influence the trajectory of academic fields. International criminology in its 21st-century manifestation continues to demonstrate a core commitment to examining the comparability of experiences between states and their societies in relation to crime and criminal justice, and equally attends to the exploration of transnational criminal risks and the transmission and operation of criminal justice policies and practices across states. Yet, in its current form, the field also displays unprecedented diversity of scope and approach.

Beyond a fascination with the evolution of global connectivity and the further compression of space and time wrought by new technologies, contemporary international criminology includes scholarship that both reflects and addresses wider public debates, including about the legacies of past colonial connections for contemporary societies and their enduring mark on the criminal justice institutions, policies and practices of our world. Amongst the enormous range of ways in which international considerations feature in contemporary international criminological research, it is the increasing visibility of radical critiques of institutions, policies and practices engaged in ‘law and order’ work broadly understood that most starkly distinguishes contemporary international criminology from its predecessors. By contrast, as has long been documented, earlier international criminology was deeply implicated in racist, eugenicist and colonial discourses and practices (Knepper, 2009; Kaluszynski, 2006).

The wide array of analytic frames evident in contemporary international criminological scholarship has been enabled by broader social, economic and political transformations that took place in many societies over the past century. These expanded the middle classes and prised open the tertiary education sector to students and academics of different socio-economic, gender and ethnic backgrounds, even if unevenly and problematically (see variously, e.g., Case et al., 2018; Bathmaker et al., 2016; Berrey, 2011), whilst maintaining a degree of protection for scholarly research from government direction. Without the widening of political enfranchisement, the expansion of social mobility, and the decline of deference to authority recorded in many jurisdictions, it is hard to see how scholarship with interests not aligned to government priorities, let alone scholarship adopting avowedly critical standpoints, would have achieved the presence within international criminological research that it has today. Acknowledging the contingency of the parameters of present-day international criminology thus seems to be a necessary prerequisite to gauging the field’s prospects today. But before reflecting further on the challenges that face it, it is important to establish the value of international criminology as an enterprise in and of itself.

Evaluating the Endeavour of International Criminology

Just as with the discipline of criminology more generally, international criminology has not lacked for sceptics. Doubts have been posed about the viability of efforts to internationalise criminological enquiry given the vast disparities that exist in data availability and reliability across jurisdictions. Questions have equally been raised about the validity of comparisons across different legal frameworks, criminal justice systems, and socio-political and cultural contexts (e.g., Nelken, 2010, 2015; van Dijk, 2008), and about whether comparisons can therefore be meaningfully made beyond relatively small groups of states whose economic, social and political profiles share a sufficient number of key attributes (Lacey & Soskice, 2021). Compounding these obstacles to comparison across space is that of comparability across time, given, once again, considerable variation in the availability and reliability of data over the course of history for different jurisdictions and the instability of legal, criminal justice and political frameworks over the medium and longer term. That most of these critiques, at scale, can and have been levelled at approaches applying different levels of analysis within criminology, does not diminish their chastening implications for the assertion of findings in the field. But neither does it serve to detract from the considerable and distinct potential for international criminology to contribute to the development of theory, policy and practice. Indeed, as elaborated below, the promise of international criminology is evident from the contributions that have already made by internationally comparative, transnational and globally-focused studies (see further Friedrichs, 2007).

Comparative international criminology—examining crime and criminal justice systems, policies and practices through cross-national comparison—offers a vital route to evaluating claims about ‘what works’, and accounting for what does not, testing the strength of relationships between policies, practices and broader socio-economic and political contexts, and providing a crucial check on universalising claims derived from single-country or small-sample studies.Footnote 1 One textbook case of this kind of contribution is the wealth of evidence compiled about crime drops in multiple jurisdictions internationally with very different criminal justice practices. This evidence was then marshalled against claims that ‘zero tolerance’ policing in New York in the 1990s was the prime driver in reducing the city’s crime rate and, as such, was a strategy that should be adopted by police forces not only across the US, but around the world (see, e.g., Farrell et al., 2010; Tonry, 2007; Zimring, 2007; Mooney & Young, 2006; Smith, 2001).

True, the marshalling of this evidence did not appear to have much success in dissipating the evident symbolic power of the narrative around ‘zero tolerance’ policing, which held so many political elites internationally in its thrall at the time (Newburn & Jones, 2007). But such research unquestionably moved the field forward by effectively falsifying the hypothesis about the significance of ‘zero tolerance’ policing in propelling the crime drops of the era. If this seems too modest an impact given the aspirations of, and pressures on, academics to inform policy, it is worth bearing in mind the wealth of literature that exists on the politics of policy-making and the various factors that impinge on the choices of policymakers as they select evidence to support their plans (Newburn & Jones, 2007).Footnote 2

Transnational criminology, meanwhile—focused on the close connectivity of crime and criminal justice across countries—, provides insights not only into the scope, scale and drivers of cross-border criminality, but also into the construction, implementation and effects of policies designed to counter them. In so doing, this body of research underscores, for example, the importance and contentiousness of supra-national assessments of crime control policy, where national-level analysis alone might otherwise give a misleading impression of policy efficacy (by missing, for example, the displacement effect of tightening restrictions in one jurisdiction leading to the dispersion or re-routing of illegal cross-border trade elsewhere; Friesendorf, 2006).

Globally-focused criminology typically attends to these themes in a wider analytic frame, addressing both broader relationships between crime and criminal justice operations across the world over time, and, in addition, international crime (that is defined as such under international law) and criminal justice institutions that address it (such as the International Criminal Court). Whether examining, for example, cross-national campaigns to mobilise support for the establishment of international prohibition regimes, such as those to outlaw the trade of slaves and of drugs (Nadelmann, 1990), or the connections between the export of toxic waste from the ‘global North’ to the ‘global South’ (see Carrington et al., 2019) in the perpetration of ecological crimes (Simon, 2006; White, 2011), globally-oriented criminology equally points to the immense significance of extra-jurisdictional drivers of policies and practices of crime control in both national and international policy-making arenas.

Beyond the aspirations of directly impacting the development of policy, the value of international research—whether applying a international comparative, transnational or global approach—is in providing a basis from which governments and states can be held to account over such issues as risk determination, public expenditure in criminal justice initiatives, health and safety management, and, above all, the upholding of civil liberties and human rights. International criminology has shed important light on the vast transnational expansion of the crime control industry that Christie (1993) famously wrote about: the growing reach of public and private sector groups servicing criminal justice agendas, and the heady symbolic politics that tend to support and insulate their operations from public scrutiny (see, e.g., Andersson, 2014; Andreas, 2010; Beare, 2003; Sheptycki, 2003). And inversely, international criminology has also implicated publics as citizens and consumers, whether, for instance, in demonstrating the breadth of assent apparently accorded to punitive governmental and intergovernmental policies against minorities and immigrants, or showcasing the mild, temporary or absent repercussions for companies whose supply chains are found to rely on gross inequalities, violent repression, or extreme forms of labour exploitation (e.g., Franko Aas, 2013; Lacey, 2008; see also Wenar, 2016).

If there seem unlimited possibilities and, indeed, promise in the unfolding of international criminology along the paths outlined above, it is nevertheless worth reflecting on the considerable challenges it now faces; challenges which make its actual prospects harder to determine.

Four Challenges

First, whilst recent years have in many ways seen important advances in the production, accessibility and comparability of data internationally, important obstacles remain evident. On one hand, the rise of corporate-driven big data systems—high-velocity, high-volume and high-variety mass data extraction and analysis practices of increasing sophistication and geographical reach—brings opportunities for international criminological research (see Wall, 2018). But big data still carry with them risks concerning algorithmic bias and verifiability (see, e.g., Ugwudike, 2020; Miller, 2014). On the other hand, with regard to conventional data from official sources, there seems little prospect that government reluctance to ensure the timely and full public release of inconvenient crime data (van Dijk, 2008) will dissipate any time soon.

In a world that places great value on the use of numerical data as part of the repertoire of technocratic expertise, it is to be expected that some international criminological research will draw on global indicators that are made available on the basis of such data. Yet the quality of these indicators seems likely to remain highly variable, requiring critique, caution and contextualised interpretation (see Siems & Nelken, 2017; Merry, 2016; Nelken, 2015; Andreas, 2010; see also Cheliotis & Xenakis, 2016; Xenakis, 2010).

Meanwhile, obstacles to the generation of academic-led international data collection initiatives remain, requiring as they do a high degree of commitment to overcoming the various logistical, methodological and personnel-related obstacles that are invariably encountered (see, e.g., van Kesteren et al., 2013). While new projects have arisen in international data collection, such as the International Self-Report Delinquency Study, others, like the International Criminal Victimisation Survey, have as yet ended without replacement. To the extent that transnational research networks are and will be facilitated, tackling the ethical and methodological issues emanating from deeply embedded hierarchies of value and power that often underlie ‘North–South’ researcher collaborations, and which serve to distort the design, execution and analysis of research (see further Cabot, 2019; Sukarieh & Tannock, 2019), will be an imperative for the field to address.

A second important challenge to navigate will be the tensions between those seeking to expand, and those to diminish, the role of criminalisation and criminal justice systems in addressing social harms (see Green & Ward, 2000), both in the international arena and within nation-states. With regard to the former, the growth of international criminal law, the rise of the International Criminal Court, and the infrastructures that sustain both, have been heralded by many as a welcome advancement in countering state crime. The campaign to have ecocide made an international crime (Higgins et al., 2013; Killean, 2021) offers just one indication of the pressure and potential for expansion that international criminal law may yet undergo.

There is significant resistance to such expansion, however. The evolving backlash to the growth of international criminal law and its institutions across different fields – human rights, peace and security, the environment, and trade—reflects the strains of the emergent multipolar international order. This backlash also shows little sign of diminishing, broadening as it has from the involvement of countries of the global South to now encompass those of the global North, including states such as the US, the UK, France and Australia (see further Danchin et al., 2021; Vinjamuri, 2017; Xenakis & Cheliotis, 2018). With regard to the international human rights regime in particular, opposition has been voiced partly on the grounds that state sovereignty has increasingly been infringed, and partly on the grounds that the ambitious over-reach of pertinent law and institutions has undermined both its legitimacy and functionality (see, e.g., Tasioulas, 2019), and calls have been made for alternative approaches to international harms to receive greater consideration (see e.g., Braithwaite, 2020).

Such criticisms have their echo in debates about the appropriate scope of national criminal law in domestic arenas (Tasioulas, 2019). Concern is manifested across left–right divides about the inflation of, and reliance upon, criminal law to address a widening array of harms. At the same time, related efforts continue to decentre legalism and criminal justice within criminological scholarship, whether towards the study of harm, for instance, or towards alternative frameworks, such as public health approaches to understanding and addressing social problems (Hillyard & Tombs, 2004; Muncie, 2000; van Dijk & Crofts, 2017). Just how wide disciplinary gatekeepers allow the gaze of international criminology to be, will determine the extent to which the field can engage with, and speak to, such developments.

A third challenge ahead for international criminology will be how, or to what extent, a balance is secured between academic freedom and reliance on research funding by governments. Since 2000, global inequality has been reducing, meaning that there has been between-country convergence. In large part, this development has been due to faster growth in the economies not only of China, but also of India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam. In fact, so far this century, there has been a large and consistent gap between the average per capita growth rate of emerging economies by comparison with the respective growth rate of the world’s advanced economies. There is widespread expectation amongst economists that this trend is more likely to continue rather than reverse over the coming decades, and bring with it a continuing expansion in the size of middle-class populations in developing economies across the globe (Milanovic, 2016). These developments have their corollary in the field of higher education and research: illustratively, as of 2018, China had the second-largest research and development budget in the world after the US and the second-largest number of researchers in the world after the EU (d’Hooghe et al., 2018). This presents obvious and much-needed opportunities for the greater internationalisation of international criminology, an imperative which post-colonial, decolonialising and in some respects also transnational criminological agendas have been working to address (see, e.g., Agozino, 2003; Carrington et al., 2015; Valdés-Riesco, 2020). It is important to recognise, however, that this internationalisation may have contractionary as well as expansionary impacts on the character of the field, to the extent that global democratic recession continues along its current trajectory.

Since the mid-2000s, the world has witnessed a stark roll-back of democracy, not only in relation to relatively new democracies and states undergoing transition that have experienced democratic break-downs and retreats, but also in relation to many established democracies where decline in the quality of democracy has been recorded, and where austerity conditions have functioned to shrink the middle classes and reduce social mobility (see, e.g., Diamond, 2021; Milanovic, 2016; Piketty, 2014). Against this backdrop, efforts to encourage and support more international diversity within scholarly fields may need to be adapted to ensure a continuing and expanding array of analytical perspectives.

To date, decolonising strategies that have been advanced in the academy include re-situating analytical frameworks derived from jurisdictions in the global North in their proper cultural and national contexts, so that their provincialism can then be transcended by a new global framework in which indigenous, local and national knowledge and scholarship from the global South forms a substantive part (e.g., Connell, 2007; Go, 2013; Patel, 2019). Within criminology, this call has begun to be answered by those advocating greater engagement with, and recognition of, the diversity of forms and experiences of crime and criminal justice across the globe and especially from the global South (see e.g., Carrington et al., 2015). Some have also called more particularly for the centring of indigenous accounts (Cunneen & Tauri, 2016), contending that the knowledge of communities situated in place should be privileged over that from groups that are non-native, diasporic, or otherwise non-conforming to national boundaries (Blagg & Anthony, 2019). Evidently, however, there is also a pressing need to consider the spectrum of risks that confront scholars in jurisdictions where speaking truth to power can (and already does) trigger punitive reactions across professional, social and political arenas, and the potential narrowing of perspectives that such a strategy could unwittingly generate. Around the world, states use detention, prosecution and other measures to both punish and restrict scholarly research, often on grounds ostensibly related to national terrorism, sedition and defamation, and there is evidence to suggest that academic persecution has been increasing over recent years (Grimm & Saliba, 2017; Scholars at Risk, 2020).

A fourth and related challenge for international criminology is to persuade audiences of the validity of its broad agenda at a time when resistance to international institutions, law and ‘elites’, is on the rise in many jurisdictions (even if such resistance itself often manifests transnational connections; see further Rothermel, 2020). Over recent years, many countries have seen the rise of movements and political parties promoting national exceptionalism and push-back against the constraints of membership of institutions and regimes of the liberal international order on the grounds that they generate unacceptable incursions into determinations that sovereign states ought to have free reign to make (Walter, 2021). In the coming years, the appeal of such sentiments looks likely to be maintained, if not increased, associated as they are with the compression on middle-class incomes and mobility in advanced economies; a development that itself does not look likely to be reversed in the near future (see Milanovic, 2016). As a field that draws attention to elements of international connectivity—from global governance and cross-border co-operation, to legacies of colonial rule abroad and at home, to the lessons to be learned from international comparative policy design and implementation—it is thus a possibility that international criminological scholarship will confront more hurdles to securing research funding and more contestation over research findings in countries where disaffection with international institutions, law and ‘elites’ is on the rise. At the same time, however, there are also significant counter-trends which suggest international criminology could not be more timely: namely, growing demands from across the world that action be taken to acknowledge and address the historical crimes and enduring harms of past colonial rule, particularly as manifested in present-day racialised criminal justice policies and practices, from policing to incarceration and deportation (see, e.g., Issar, 2020; Nijjar, 2018).

Conclusion: Sustaining and Nurturing Diversity

Much depends for the future of criminology on the direction that current social, economic and political developments take. These trends will shape how the opportunities and obstacles relating to the availability and comparability of data will be balanced within, and amongst, states. They will determine the extent to which academic freedom will be compromised by dependence on the priorities and funding of governments and companies. As politico-economic and legal dominance of the global North in the international arena continues to fragment, and the multipolarity of the international state system increases, international criminology seems bound to become far more inclusive in terms of both its jurisdictional coverage and the national identity of contributing scholars. Recent years have seen movement towards these ends gathering pace and there are clearly good reasons for expecting further significant advances, which are vital to the development of the field.

It is less clear, however, whether these developments will work to expand or, indeed, maintain the current degree of diversity of thematic range and analytical framing evident in contemporary international criminological scholarship. Uncertainty in this respect is a direct outcome of the intensity of the strains and challenges of the present moment as outlined above. So long as tensions remain, growing diversity and inclusivity can be expected to continue to reflect the profile of international criminological scholarship, and International Criminology will have a valuable part to play in ensuring that such diversity is sustained and nurtured in the years ahead, however turbulent they prove to be.