Book Review: Globalization & Crime
| DOI | 10.1177/20322844211028945 |
| Author | Paul Kenneth Mwirigi Kinyua |
| Date | 01 December 2021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Globalization & Crime, Katja Franko (3rd ed., London: SAGE Publishing, 2019), ISBN 9781526445230, 320 pp.,
£30.99
Reviewed by: Paul Kenneth Mwirigi Kinyua, Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, Kenya
DOI: 10.1177/20322844211028945
Keywords
crime, globalisation, crimonology, penal state
“Globalisation”is understood in this book as “a complex set of developments with multiple
modalities.”In-depth knowledge of society, politics, urbanisation, trade and migration from
a worldwide perspective is necessary to comprehend the true nature of globalisation in relation to the
category of ‘crime’which is equally multi-faceted according to this book.
Globalisation is claimed to have unfolded on the world scene in two waves; the first wave of
globalisation during the early 1990s was marked by widespread consensus among many social
commentators that the state was ‘withering away’due to the rising power of multinational cor-
porations and international organisations. This was followed by a second wave of globalisation
which is still unfolding and whose key features are the persistence of the state and realisation of the
importance of the state to both national and global economies, as revealed by the massive in-
vestment of public money to save the global financial system during the 2008 crisis.
The author, Katja Franko of the University of Oslo, is a professor of criminology. However, the
argument in this book does not, as tradition would have it, revolve around the concepts and doctrines
of criminology and their relationship with globalisation. From the outset, a critical understanding is
adopted concerning criminal activity in the world economy and its regulation by states in the context
of declining welfare states in developed countries and imposition of neoliberal economic policies in
the global South over the preceding four decades.
The facts about the ‘unevenness’of globalisation and its ‘paradoxes’such as the spawning of
a‘borderless world’for inhabitants of a small number of Western nations, hand in hand with
‘pervasive structural inequality’at the expense of the global South, are not only described in this
book but also explained with great care.
The elaboration of what constitutes a crime is non-technical and critical. The book examines the
‘crimes of globalisation’, said to result from the policies of the World Bank, IMF (International
Monetary Fund) and WTO (World Trade Organisation) and to have brought “demonstrably harmful
consequences, disproportionately on large numbers of people living in developing countries.”The
wider category of ‘harm’as opposed to the more restrictive legal definitions of ‘crime’is outlined
and is preferred because it addresses structural and systemic phenomena that are important in the
study of “transgressions against ecosystems, humans, and non-humans.”These include broader
issues of environmental degradation, societal values such as the addiction to cheap oil and the
political value placed on the pursuit of economic growth by the developed countries and the
imposition of this “value”on the developing countries.
The book highlights the dangers of attempts to tear down the legal order so as to preserve the
social order. It offers a critical review of some emergent policies of crime control such as the
‘precautionary logic’exemplified by the ‘denaturalisation’of the ‘foreign fighters’who travel from
their countries of birth in the UK and several Western states to Syria, Iraq, Libya and other troubled
spots to fight alongside rebel groups. It discusses the methods of aggressive policing and the
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