Youth in Crisis? Gangs, Territoriality and Violence. Edited by Barry Goldson (London: Routledge, 2011, 248pp. 25.99)

Abstract

Barry Goldson’s new edited collection Youth in Crisis? Gangs, Territoriality and Violence (Routledge 2011) addresses the vexed question of youth ‘gangs’ in the United Kingdom, collating and consolidating the current range of academic evidence and opinion on the subject. Drawing on a broad sweep of contributors, the collection eschews any attempt at a comprehensive account of ‘gangs in the UK’, preferring to open up the youth ‘gang’ question to debate and critique. As a result, it is resolutely more ‘state of the art’ than ‘state of the nation’, delineating the varied (if somewhat disunified) body of gang research in the United Kingdom, and providing a much-needed critical foundation for developing further theoretical and empirical research in this highly fraught area. The collection is book-ended by two excellent reviews of literature and evidence on the gang phenomenon—one on the United Kingdom, one on the global context—which will prove invaluable to the uninitiated researcher or student. The opening chapter, by Barry Goldson, frames the youth ‘gang’ debate in the context of his own expert appraisal of youth criminalization discourse, shunting the issue away from the default American gang criminology and more squarely into British traditions of youth criminology. The final chapter, by Rob White, neatly deconstructs a disparate and diverse set of literatures into a set of global ‘propositions’ on gangs and transnationalism that situate the preceding debates within the relevant international literature. While the acuity of these contributions might have been sharpened (or added to) by a more detailed analysis of the intellectual development of gang research in the United Kingdom—and its specific intersections with, for example, US gang research—there is ample material for the purposes of contextualization and overview.