Comparing cultures, comparing crime: Challenges, prospects and problems for a global criminology

Globalization will intensify contacts – and perhaps conflicts – betweencultures more than ever in the history of humankind. The flow of migrantsaround the world, global business and global consumption provide us withnew experiences of difference and diversity as well as of common ground.As in other social sciences, the concept of culture has recently emerged oncentre stage in criminology. Western criminologists look in awe to Asia, andtry to solve the enigma of modern, affluent societies with low ratesespecially of violent crimes. Asian criminologists warn of an impact ofWestern culture that might cause rising crime rates. Asian models of socialcontrol are studied and adopted in Australia, Europe and the US, and viceversa.Crime and social control are social and cultural phenomena. Therefore,comparing cultures and comparing crime will offer new insights, freshtheories and chances of innovative perspectives. What is to learn fromcultural differences, what from universals in crime and social control? Whatwill be the fate of ``general theories of crime'' in different cultures? Willpractices of criminal justice be efficient when transported to another socialand cultural environment?Criminologists should develop a clear notion of the problems that arerelated to comparing cultures and crime. Cultures are not monolithic.Cultural comparisons often suffer from exaggerations of differences, andproduce exaggerated predictions and expectations. On its way into theglobalized 21st century, criminology will have to develop strategies to meetthe challenge of comparing cultures, to avoid former errors, and to solvethe problems that lie ahead.     

Symbolic state-building in contemporary Russia

Vladimir Putin has made state-building a central goal of his presidency and recent scholarship has demonstrated that Russian formal institutions have indeed been deliberately reformed. Unlike studies that ass’ess state-building vis-à-vis a particular outcome, our research examines what kind of state Russian political elites seek to build, and focuses on symbolic state-building strategies. To capture symbolic state-building in the Putin era, we examine the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts: annual, high-profile TV broadcasts in which citizens pose questions to the president. We find that a broad range of formal institutions appear to be central to Putin’s state-building project, a finding that runs counter to claims that governance is largely deinstitutionalized, informal and personal. We argue that symbolic state-building seeks to reconcile personalism and institutionalism, by conveying a dual image of a state in citizens’ everyday lives – emphasizing both formal institutions, while also affirming Putin as the personal guarantor of the state’s authority.     

Three Forms of Interpersonal Trust: Evidence from Swedish Municipalities

Social trust is usually treated as a dichotomy between particularized and generalized trust. In this article it is argued that a third distinct form, community trust, is neither particularized nor generalized and bounded in space rather than persons. Factor analysis of survey data from 33 Swedish municipalities (N = 6,453) distinguishes between particularized, generalized and community trust. Furthermore, regression analyses show that the three trust forms have partly distinct antecedents and linked to different types of behaviours. While generalized trust best predicts leaps of faith in relation to strangers, community trust is the only trust form significantly predicting taking part in local problem solving. Finally, multilevel analysis shows that community trust is the trust form most vulnerable to changes with respect to ethnic diversity and socioeconomic equality.     

Assets in the age of tourism: the development of heritage planning in Ghanaian policy

Heritage planning in Ghana is mainly governed by the idea of sustainable pro-poor tourism, but is only marginally integrated with general planning programmes and fragmentally addressed by policy-makers. Motivated by the general lack of research on heritage policy in Ghana, this paper examines the role of heritage planning in national socio-economic, cultural and tourism policy and highlights various ambiguities in terms of concepts, objectives and approaches. The major findings show gaps between rational and communicative planning ideals, between informal management systems and wider democratic concerns, and between delimited and comprehensive planning perspectives. The central argument is that the lack of coherence among different development planning perspectives is an issue that future heritage policy-making needs to consider in order to balance tourism development with concerns such as social stability, community development and local pride of place.     

Queer Contestations and the Future of a Critical “Queer” Criminology

It is intuitive to include critical criminologists in early conversations about “queering” criminology given that the paradigms and methods of critical criminology can be employed to challenge subordination and inequality in its several dimensions. The first part (and main focus) of this article problematizes this intuition, which is easy to accept at face value, by reflecting backwards and explaining how early influential critical criminological views perpetuated damaging stereotypes and representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people as sexual deviants. The second part reflects forward, and discusses the difficulties of carving a space in the discipline for critical queer perspectives. Drawing on critical and critical race theories, this article advocates a relational, intersectional approach to conceptualize sexual orientation and gender identity in criminological theory and research. This approach considers the connections among sexual orientation or gender identity and other differences (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, gender, etc.) without assuming or attaching fixed meanings to those differences.