No abstract

The concept of governance alerts us to the exercise of political authority beyond the nation state. In criminological thought governance has been associated with the preventive turn in crime control strategies in Europe that acknowledge the limits of criminal justice, invoke the direct participation of other statutory as well as commercial and voluntary sector actors and, in so doing, generate new objects and places of control signified by notions of 'safety' and 'security'. The corollary of this preventive turn is a geohistorical approach to comparative criminology that is capable of recognizing the diverse contexts that constitute new governable places and objects.

This article is presented in two interconnected parts. It addresses issues that have arguably received insufficient attention in most sociologically oriented criminological research and commentary on youth justice and related policy and practice developments, both within the UK jurisdictions and in wider international contexts. First, it highlights the need to recognize the complexities of comparative policy analysis at international, national, regional and local levels. Second, in the light of such complexity, the article attempts to explore the challenges confronting social science in general and sociological criminology in particular, in efforts to critically inform policymaking processes. In conclusion, it is suggested that the possibilities for vibrant, critical and publicly engaged academic intervention in the youth justice policy sphere rest upon the mobilization of theoretically and empirically based analyses, together with research-informed proposals for policy formation and practice development.

This paper engages critically with the major variants of contemporary communitarian thought on crime and disorder. It begins with an assess ment of the moral authoritarian communitarianism of Etzioni and Dennis. It is then argued that there are different and more radical appro priations of community associated with the work of intellectuals in Europe and Oceania beyond that of moral authoritarianism. In particu lar, the development of radical re-imaginings of community and social justice are identified in communitarian work on ( 1 ) local governance and the re-constitution of civil society, (2) basic income and the common good and (3) restorative justice. In conclusion, it is argued that there are progressive as well as the already widely recognized regressive poten tialities in contemporary communitarian discourses on law and order.

Implicit in the concept of negotiated orders is an understanding of the social productivity of political power; the power to accomplish governing programmes for citizens as much as the power over citizens for the purposes of social control. This distinction is especially pertinent for the role of political analysis in critical criminological thought, where criticism of the authoritarian state has vied with studies of governmentality and governance to explain the exercise of political power beyond the State and with the distinction between politics and administration found in liberal criminology. Outside of criminology, political economists interested in the 'power to' govern suggest its analysis in terms of 'regimes' of advocacy coalitions that struggle for the capacity to govern complex problems and populations in specific social contexts. Regime formation or failure can differ in character, and in outcomes, as much within nation states as between them and in relation to different kinds of governing problems. The article considers the applicability of regime theory to the negotiation of 'public safety', a governing problem which is a particular focus for political analysis within criminology.