Abstract
This paper takes as its starting point the recent interventions of Jock Young (2011) on the contemporary state of criminology. In adding to these observations those made by Connell (2007) and Aas (2012), the case will be made, following de Sousa Santos (2014), for a criminology of absences. In endeavouring to uncover these absences, the paper will consider how the ‘bogus of positivism’ (Young 2011, chapter 4), its associated presumptions and related conceptual thinking, manifest themselves in two substantive areas of contemporary concern: violence against women and violent extremism. With the first of these issues I shall consider the ongoing controversies in which the bogus of positivism is most apparent: the powerful influence of the criminal victimisation survey as the data gathering instrument about such violence. In the second area of concern, this bogus of positivism is most apparent in its ‘nomothetic impulse’ (ibid: 73). Both of these discussions will expose different, but connected absences within criminology. In the final and concluding part of this paper, I shall return to the questions posed by the title of this paper: whither criminology, and in the light of this discussion, offer some thoughts on the place of Asian criminology within criminology’s global future(s).
Highlights
The work of Connell (2007), Aas (2012) and de Sousa Santos (2014) amongst others add some considerable weight to the call made by Young (2011) of the need for criminology to rethink its engagement with the bogus of positivism
It is without doubt that the criminal victimisation survey has increasingly become the preferred method for measuring the nature and extent of violence against women
In exploring these two aspects of violence that have become pertinent issues for criminology across the globe, as part of a continuum of violence routinely but differently experienced in people’s everyday lives, I have been concerned to offer a criminology of absences in relation to them
Summary
She observes: The global does not present itself as a smooth, unified surface, a plane of immanence accessible through a zoom function, but rather as a dynamic multiplicity of surfaces and tectonic boundaries It is in these meeting points and frictions between the global north and south, between licit and illicit worlds, that criminology has an opportunity to gain (and provide other social sciences with) invaluable insight into the nature of the contemporary world order’. The work of Connell (2007), Aas (2012) and de Sousa Santos (2014) amongst others add some considerable weight to the call made by Young (2011) of the need for criminology to rethink its engagement with the bogus of positivism. In the final and concluding part of this paper, I shall return to the question posed by the title of this paper: whither criminology, and offer some initial thoughts on the place of Asian criminology within criminology’s global future(s)
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