Justice Tankebe and Alison Liebling (eds) (2013). Legitimacyand Criminal Justice: An International Exploration

Abstract

Tankebe and Liebling have, as they state in their introduction to the book, produced a comprehensive work which contains ‘substantial new contributions to this important field by some of the best political and theoretical scholars in it’ (p. 2). The genesis for the book was a 2012 multidisciplinary conference of the same name. The work aims to provide a synthesis of developments concerning legitimacy, along with an updating of some theories and the work was written with the hope that it would act as a spur to further research on this key topic. The work provides a detailed analysis of the many, sometimes competing, contexts of legitimacy within the arenas of policing, prisons, and criminal justice and it allows the reader to understand the very different interpretations of what constitutes legitimacy from these diverse perspectives. The work consists of a total of 16 chapters and the list of contributors read more like a ‘who’s who’ of the key senior academics and experts in their respective fields and these are drawn from a range of different academic backgrounds, namely; criminology, political science, international relations, and sociology. This is a strength of this work as it allows police practitioners and academics, the opportunity to expand their own understanding of what legitimacy means as the work moves beyond the usual policing approach to this concept where legitimacy is perceived as the ‘rightful exercise of authority or the rightful use of power’ (Mawby, 2008, p. 157).