Space–Time Patterns of Risk: A Cross National Assessment of Residential Burglary Victimization

Using epidemiological techniques for testing disease contagion, it has recently been found that in the wake of a residential burglary, the risk to nearby homes is temporarily elevated. This paper demonstrates the ubiquity of this phenomenon by analyzing space–time patterns of burglary in 10 areas, located in five different countries. While the precise patterns vary, for all areas, houses within 200 m of a burgled home were at an elevated risk of burglary for a period of at least two weeks. For three of the five countries, differences in these patterns may partly be explained by simple differences in target density. The findings inform theories of crime concentration and offender targeting strategies, and have implications for crime forecasting and crime reduction more generally.

The global stocktake: design lessons for a new review and ambition mechanism in the international climate regime

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The pledge-and-review architecture of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change has been praised as a new model of global...     

Domestic abuse,civil protection orders and the `new criminologies': is there any value in engaging with the law?

Changes in government policy over the last two decades have seen the traditional goals of criminal justice, namely prosecution and punishment, being replaced by an emphasis on prevention, fear reduction, security and harm reduction. During this time domestic abuse has gained a place on the political agenda, which has resulted in legislative initiatives in the form of civil protection orders across the U.K. which primarily focus on prevention but have also more recently begun to rely on the traditional criminal justice responses should they fail to prevent further abuse. Drawing on international evaluations and a recent study conducted in Scotland (the Scottish study), the article examines whether legislation in the form of civil protection orders has the effect of curtailing the actions of abusers and if not, what occurs when the traditional criminal justice response comes into play. The strengths of civil protection orders and some explanations for the weaknesses of these orders are considered alongside the question of whether there is any value in women continuing to engage with the law in response to domestic abuse. An erratum to this article can be found at     

A consumer's perspective on domestic violence interventions

The current study takes a consumer perspective to examine the impact of legal and mental health systems on couples who are experiencing problems with domestic violence. Unfortunately, their thoughts and wishes are rarely considered when planning for change in their lives. The study asks couples what they think happens to cause abusive episodes, what happens to them when someone finds out about the abuse, and what their thoughts are about the interventions they receive. The specific interventions in this study were a pro-arrest policy and solution-focused brief therapy.     

The national dimension of citizenship in T.H. Marshall

In the revival of the political theory of citizenship, T.H. Marshall is a seminal influence. A major attraction is clearly his apparent reversal of the usual relation between membership and rights. Whereas rights are commonly regarded as deriving from membership, Marshall raises the possibility that appropriate combinations of rights may be constitutive of membership in the form of citizenship, a form not determined by any prior identity. This is of immediate relevance for analysis of possible postnational reformulations of citizenship. Yet theoretical discussion must take seriously the derivation of membership from rights, which requires attention to the concrete sociological process by which rights become endowed with meaning. Although it has received comparatively little comment, this theme is central to Marshall's discussion, which provides some suggestive pointers to the main theoretical issues. In particular, Marshall reproduces the standard British ambivalence about the ‘national’, which is variously and sometimes confusingly distinguished from the ‘local’, the ‘private’ and the ‘foreign’. The ‘civilisation’ of which Marshall suggests that it should be a ‘common heritage’ is historically situated—in fact it is precisely because it is in one sense already common that social pressure gradually causes it to be recognized as such. In other words, it is possible to show that Marshall's analysis specifically addresses the issues of citizenship within the nation‐state. Its potential relevance beyond the nation‐state requires, therefore, explicit discussion of the social basis of belonging that Marshall, for his own purposes, was able to take for granted.