Introduction: Constructing Juvenile Delinquency in a Global Context

Abstract

The division between East and West has been one of the most important structuring principles used to make sense of the world both today and in the past. Historically, it has been most commonly applied by individuals and groups who have identified with the West and has been used to denote a particular geopolitical relationship, between the West as the stronger, superior partner and the weaker, dependent East.¹ Insofar as transfers of legal ideas and institutions have been considered by historians in the context of East-West divisions, they have mostly been seen as taking place from West to East, and tend to be interpreted within a discourse of imperial “improvement” and “civilization”. In recent years (in particular, since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism2), it has become popular to critique this division and to question how it came into being and what relation it bears to historical reality.³ The East-West binary has been articulated in a variety of geopolitical contexts: within the continent of Europe, between Western imperial powers and their “Eastern” colonies and between the Western and Eastern hemispheres more broadly. In the post-war period, the East-West division was once again reinterpreted against the background of the Cold War to refer primarily to the division between the capitalist “free” West and the Soviet Communist East. Although this was a significant variation of the traditional East-West division, it should not be seen as a separate phenomenon, as it continued to bear the familiar imprint of “superior” West versus “inferior” East.⁴