Abstract

With the consolidation of a cosmopolitan field of international criminal justice, penality has ‘gone global’. In spite of the abundance of doctrinal legal analysis, human rights studies, and transitional justice studies, there are few analytic attempts to engage with the working assumptions, cultural commitments, and dominant mentalities that give shape to international criminal justice as a penal field. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews with key actors, and critical reading of international criminal justice scholarship, this article compares the cosmopolitan penality of international criminal justice to that of late modern, domestic, penality. Using David Garland’s The Culture of Control as an analytic yardstick, it argues that international criminal justice both resembles and departs from ‘the national’. For example, whilst the cosmopolitan penality relies upon retributive justifications, it makes no appeal to harsh penal sanctions; nor is it concerned with the rehabilitation of prisoners. Rather, it is an expressive and humanitarian form of justice where the victim takes central stage – as the embodiment of a suffering humanity. Moreover, there is a remarkable faith in the transformative effects of international criminal justice, resembling a form of penal welfarism ‘gone global’. As national capacity building and penal development has become intrinsic to the project of international criminal justice, the article shows how the global dimension of the power to punish is based on a moralization of politics.

Highlights

  • Within punishment and society scholarship, David Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control has become a contemporary classic

  • By offering an extensive diagnosis of late-modern penality, the book is amongst the foremost contributions to a theoretically informed criminology of changing patterns of crime control in latemodern western societies

  • The analysis has been intentionally general in order to map out trends and tendencies of an emerging cosmopolitan penality – a complex of actors and institutions, discourses and processes, norms and laws that situate issues of crime, punishment, and moral order within a cosmopolitan rather than a national scale

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Summary

Introduction

Within punishment and society scholarship, David Garland’s (2001) The Culture of Control has become a contemporary classic. Garland’s analysis has been subject to a plethora of critique These engaged readers take issue with either the theoretical scale or empirical scope of his work, such as Matthews (2002), who miss both large-scale theory as well as empirical nuance, and Feeley (2003: 114), who notes that ‘the level of generality is at times frustrating’. The critique against The Culture of Control largely parallel the ‘number of troubling blind spots’ (Bosworth, 2012: 125; Crewe, 2015) in punishment and society scholarship generally, which only attributes to the significance of the book’s analysis and the engaged scholarship within punishment and society (for a response to critics, see Garland, 2004)

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