Focusing on the perspectives of conventional criminologists, this text provides a critical introduction to international criminology through examples from the US, UK, and Australia. It explores key concepts, vocabulary, and findings while addressing underlying issues within the field. Covering theoretical traditions, historical contexts, and contemporary practices, it serves as an essential resource for undergraduates and a valuable refresher for advanced students, making it a comprehensive guide to understanding international crime research.
Focusing on the political engagement of young people, Judith Bessant challenges traditional perceptions and myths surrounding their involvement in politics. She reveals the significant disconnect between societal narratives about youth and their actual history of political activism, emphasizing the need to acknowledge and understand their contributions to modern politics.
Focusing on the profound impact of AI, robotics, and digital media, the book delves into the historical and evolutionary context of these technological advancements. It seeks to clarify the complexities surrounding the changes in work, culture, and social life, proposing a new perspective on the 'great transformation' and its implications for human consciousness. Through this lens, it encourages readers to consider the significance of these developments in shaping our future.
Focusing on the voices of disadvantaged youth born since the early 1980s, the book documents their struggles with rising unemployment and inequality. It examines how public policies in the USA, UK, France, Spain, and Australia have contributed to this generational disadvantage, providing a critical analysis of the socio-economic challenges faced by these young individuals.
This book offers a distinctive and novel approach to state-sponsored violence, one of the major problems facing humanity in the previous and now the twenty-first century. It addresses the question: how is it possible that large numbers of ordinary men and women are able to do the killing, torturing and violence that defines crimes against humanity? In his striking analysis, Rob Watts shows how and why states, of all political persuasions, engage in crimes against humanity, including: genocide, homicide, torture, kidnapping, illegal surveillance and detention. This book advances a new interpretive frame. It argues against the 'civilizing process' model, showing how both states and social sciences like sociology and criminology have been complicit in splitting 'the social' from 'the ethical' while accepting too complacently that modern states are the exemplars of morality and rationality. The book makes the case that it is possible to bring together in the one interpretative frame, our understanding of social action involving personal motivation and ethical responsibility and patterns of collective social action operating in terms of the agencies of 'the State'. Rob Watts identifies and charts the pathways of action and 'practical' (i.e. ethical) judgements which the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity constructed for themselves to make sense of what they were doing. At once challenging and highly accessible, the book reveals the policy-making processes that produce state crime as well as showing how ordinary people do the state's dirty work
Anxiety about unemployment, homelessness, poverty and crime has always been around. Today, governments, experts and the media spend a lot of time talking about people at risk, the measurement and prediction of risk factors, encouraging resiliency and the need for early intervention. What are the politics, origins and meanings behind risk talk? Is the discovery and management of risk factors capable of offering real solutions? This lively, provocative book asks these questions by examining youth employment, homelessness and juvenile crime. It is a must-read for policy makers, human service workers, researchers and anyone interested in the key social issues of our time.
