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Featured abstracts from 2017 Crime & Justice in Asia & the Global South Conference

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Next year, the Crime and Justice Research Centre will co-host the Crime and Justice in Asia and the Global South International Conference with the Asian Criminological Society. The conference will be held in Cairns from 10-13 July 2017 and will feature international speakers:

  • Professor Rosemary Barberet;
  • Professor Jiahong Liu;
  • Professor John Braithwaite; and
  • Professor Raewyn Connell.

To showcase the diversity of topics that will be presented during the conference, each week the CJRC blog will feature an accepted abstract from a presenter.

This week’s featured abstract is from Dr. Ross McGarry from the University of Liverpool. Dr McGarry is also a successful recipient of a CJRC Early-Career Researcher Scholarship in Southern Criminology.

Last month, the CJRC awarded eleven successful applicants from around the world with Early-Career Researcher and Senior Fellow scholarships in Southern Criminology. The main purpose of the scholarships are to support the travel and attendance to the 2017 conference and to support collaborative research with CJRC scholars on topics related to developing the projects of Southern Criminology. A list of the successful applicants can be accessed here.

Featured abstract: 

“For a Southern Criminology of War” by Dr Ross McGarry, University of Liverpool

Abstract: The study of war within criminology has a long and potted history. Throughout the First and Second World Wars the criminogenic properties of war, and the individuals and states who participate in it, were cast as the main concerns of the discipline (Bonger, 1916; Mannheim, 1941; Cornhill, 1951). This remained the case until the late 20th century when Jamieson (1998) advocated for an intellectual move ‘Towards a criminology of war in Europe’. Other work continued throughout the 21st century to conceptualise war as a critical criminological concern (Ruggiero 2005); emerging in the wake of the 11th September 2001 attacks in North America (Scraton, 2002; Young, 2007), and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hudson 2008; Green and Ward, 2009). Despite this attention, Hagan (2015) later accused ‘American criminology’ to have been ‘sleeping’ in the wake of these events. What is most apparent from this extant literature however is its historical preoccupation with metropolitan discourse. As Wayne Morrison (2006) illustrates, rather than being a ‘global’ discipline, criminological theorising in this way merely recreates a Northern imperialistic world view. Taking influence from the presence of war and violence in Raewyn Connell’s (2007) Southern Theory, this paper will seek to make a critical intervention in the existing criminological scholarship on war. Drawing on criminological work concerned with war violence in the Global South (e.g. Mullins and Rothe, 2008; Braithwaite and Wardak, 2012; Rafter, 2016), this paper will explore the problems and possibilities of a ‘Southern Criminology of War’ (qua McGarry and Walklate, 2016).

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