Rethinking critical criminology

This paper takes the form of a report on the panel discussion held at the conclusion of the 1992 meetings of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control in Padua in September 1992. In the light of a perceived crisis of relevance for earlier, 1970s notions of critique in criminology, and in the context of a conference dedicated to the theme of human rights in a uniting Europe, eight panellists from Italy, England, and Canada via Ireland debated their different versions of the project of critical criminology in the last years of the twentieth century. Each of these presentations is summarised here, and an attempt is made to recognise the emergence of a debate between a human rights criminology, eversensitive to the possibilities of repression and control in Fortress Europe, and an alternative perspective, predicated perhaps on some notion of Social Defence and a realist programme of crime prevention and control across free market Europe.     

Reviews

G. N. Khanin, Sovetskii ekonomicheskii rost: analiz zapadnykh otsenok. Novosibirsk: 1993, 156 pp.

William Moskoff, Hard Times: Impoverishment and Protests in the Perestroika Years. The Soviet Union 1985–1991. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1993, xii + 244 pp., $59.95 h/b, $24.95 p/b.

Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother, Michael Burawoy & Pavel Krotov, What About the Workers? London: Verso, 1993, 248 pp., £34.95 h/b, £11.95 p/b.

Kazimierz Z. Poznanski (ed), Stabilization and Privatization in Poland: An Economic Evaluation of the Shock Therapy Program. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993, vii + 269 pp.

Norbert Zmijewski, The Catholic‐Marxist Ideological Dialogue in Poland, 1945–1980. Alder‐shot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1991, 179 pp., £37.50.

Andrzej K. Kozminski, Catching Up? Organizational and Management Change in The Ex‐Socialist Block. New York: State University of New York Press, 1993, viii + 236 pp., $16.95.

Don van Atta (ed), The ‘Farmer Threat’. The Political Economy of Agrarian Reform in Post‐Soviet Russia. Boulder, CO, and Oxford: Westview Press, 1993, xiii + 221pp., £25.50.

Malcolm R. Hill & Caroline M. Hay, Trade, Industrial Cooperation and Technology Transfer‐Continuity and Change in a New Era of East‐West Relations. Aldershot: Avebury Publishing, 1993, vii + 123 pp.

J. Arch Getty & Roberta T. Manning (eds), Stalinist Terror. New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, viii + 294 pp., £35.00, $39.95 h/b, £13.95, $17.95 p/b.

Vladimir Andreff, La crise des economies socialistes. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1993, 447 pp., 140 francs.

Alexander J. Motyl, Dilemmas of Independence. Ukraine After Totalitarianism. New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1993, xv + 217 pp., $17.95 p/b.

John Dunstan (ed), Soviet Education under Perestroika. Papers from the IV World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, UK, 1990. London: Routledge, xii + 230 pp., £35.00.

Deming Brown, The Last Years of Soviet Russian Literature. Prose Fiction 1975–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, x + 208 pp., £35.00, $54.95.

Carmelo Mesa‐Lago (ed), Cuba—After the Cold War. Pittsburgh, PA, and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993, 383 pp., $49.95 h/b, $19.95 p/b.     

E‐government in China

The article analyses e‐government progress in China. It provides a brief overview of benchmarking studies and their evaluation of China, plus a contextual analysis of e‐government initiatives in China and of the changing official position witnessed in the past two decades. It then takes stock of e‐government in China in the first quarter of 2004. On this basis, it considers the significance of contemporary e‐government activity for Chinese governance. The argument is that e‐government is currently having no more than a limited impact on the Chinese public sector. However, there are strong grounds for optimism about future development. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pursuing justice,respecting the law

Conclusion In the 1980s, despite the rise of terrorist attacks worldwide, the international community failed to respond cooperatively. When U.S. citizens were the focus of attacks, even friendly countries had little incentive to risk the safety of their citizens or the tenets of their foreign policy to prosecute terrorists. In response, the United States passed statutes providing for extraterritorial jurisdiction over acts committed abroad against U.S. citizens and then engaged in a series of dramatic seizures to enforce these measures. Unfortunately, these abductions were generally not defensible under international law and, in any event, could not be used when a terrorist was located within the territory of a major friendly country. In large part unexpectedly, however, the statutes have rendered such extraordinary measures unnecessary while still remedying what was a visible failure of international criminal cooperation.Even without threatening international abductions, the United States can use the Hostage Taking Act and the Terrorist Prosecution Act to demand extradition and to undertake independent investigations of violations of federal laws. These efforts put pressure on governments that have custody over terrorists. The international and the diplomatic consequences of neither extraditing nor prosecuting have proven sufficient to encourage U.S. allies to prosecute terrorists themselves. Surprisingly, therefore, the statutes have turned out to be effective because they encourage prosecutions of terrorists abroad, thereby remedying a failure in international cooperation and helping to ensure a consistent, strong, international response to acts of terrorism despite the continued inability of the United States to obtain custody of those attacking its citizens.This is a revised version of a paper presented at an international workshop on Principles and Procedures for a New Transnational Criminal Law, organized jointly by the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany, May 21–25, 1991.Class of 1993, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.     

Reviews

Laszlo Csaba (ed.), Privatisation, Liberalisation and Destruction (Recreating the Market in Central and Eastern Europe). Aldershot and Brookfield, NY: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 1994.

Iliana Zloch‐Christy, Eastern Europe in a Time of Change: Economic and Political Dimensions. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994, xvii + 143 pp.

J. Michael Waller, Secret Empire. The KGB in Russia Today. Oxford: Westview, 1994 x + 390 pp., £42.50 h/b, £13.50 p/b.

James M. Goldgeier, Leadership Style and Soviet Foreign Policy. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, x + 169 pp., £29.00.

Vladimir Andrle, A Social History of Twentieth‐Century Russia. London: Edward Arnold, 1994, xi + 289 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

Graeme Gill, The Collapse of a Single‐Party System: The Disintegration of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, xi + 255 pp., $35.00 h/b, $14.95 p/b.

John J. Stephan, The Russian Far East: A History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, xxiii + 481 pp.