The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia. By David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 522 pp. $35.00 paper.

Abstract

The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia. By David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 522 pp. $35.00 paper. By the time the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated in 1948, there were only eight independent states that had completely abolished the death penalty. When the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was approved in 1966, there were still only 26 abolitionist countries, several of them very small states. After 1988, however, the rate of countries abolishing the death penalty increased dramatically. Today, 71 percent of states are either abolitionist in law or abolitionist in practice; that is, they no longer inflict or intend to inflict the ultimate penalty (Hood & Hoyle 2008: n.p.). A human rights dynamic, producing a new pattern of abolition, has been responsible for this extraordinary change, a dynamic that started in Europe but has recently spread to other parts of the world. In The Next Frontier, David Johnson and Franklin Zimring direct their considerable expertise toward the question of whether this dynamic is likely to assist the abolitionist cause across Asia. In doing so they consider the extent to which ''Asian values'' might impede progress across the region. The authors explore the changing penal landscape in Asia through comparative analysis and detailed case studies of certain countries. While only four Asian states (Nepal, Bhutan, Cambodia, and the Philippines) have so far completely abolished the death penalty, six others are now abolitionist de facto, including most recently South Korea. Johnson and Zimring focus primarily on retentionist jurisdictions in East Asia because of the high rate of executions there and becauseFas they acknowledgeFthey had to be selective, given the challenges of providing a comprehensive analysis of such a vast area. Whilst they demonstrate that China, North Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam are prolific in their use of the ultimate sanction, their comparative analyses suggest a movement away from reliance on state execution elsewhere, with the death penalty seeming to serve little more than a symbolic function in some jurisdictions. More important, they show that when authoritarian states, such as South Korea, become more democratic, recourse to capital punishment declines. So what of the explanatory power of ''Asian values''? Do some Asian states explicitly reject Western individualism and Western concepts of human rights, in preference of local cultures and traditions that place a greater value on social harmony and the good of the community? Not according to this commanding book. Johnson and Zimring show that neither culture and tradition nor crime control can adequately explain the retention of capital punishment across Asia. Instead, they turn the reader's attention to politics; they show that authoritarian state power over the people provides much of the rationale for retention. In this thesis, China, Vietnam, Singapore, and North Korea are the more aggressive users because they are authoritarian regimes. …