Book Review: Place, Race and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis by Leanne Weber, Jarrett Blaustein, Kathryn Benier, Rebecca Wickes and Diana Johns
| Published date | 01 August 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231172830 |
| Author | Bonar Buffam |
| Date | 01 August 2023 |
Book Reviews
Leanne Weber, Jarrett Blaustein, Kathryn Benier, Rebecca Wickes and Diana Johns, Place, Race and
Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis, Emerald Publishing: Bingley, 2021; 152 pp.:
9781800430464, £65 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Bonar Buffam, University of British Columbia, Canada
In March 2016, an episode of violence that occurred between groups of youth and police
at a public festival in Melbourne, Australia instigated an extended law and order crisis
about the criminality of African migrants in the Australian state of Victoria. In Place,
Race, and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis, Weber et al. track how
this crisis was conditioned by racialized relations of belonging that have contributed to
the marginality and insecurity of Sudanese and South Sudanese communities in the
region. Framed as a monograph, the book weaves together a number of otherwise distinct
research projects on the criminalization of African communities in Melbourne to docu-
ment how the law and order crisis was at once precipitated and framed by the different
institutional practices of local media, state politicians, and law enforcement. If the
book can be understood as an experiment in form, it is a successful one insofar as the
authors have crafted a cohesive explanatory narrative that conveys how the specific prac-
tices of these institutions have converged to delimit and refigure the political circum-
stances of local African communities. Given the scope of analysis that is facilitated by
the authors’collaboration, this book should be instructive for other groups of researchers
wanting to write across the results of different projects to explicate a given event or issue
from multiple vantage points.
The book takes a number of compositional and theoretical cues from Policing the
Crisis, a multi-author study led by Stuart Hall that is now a classic in cultural studies
and critical criminology (Hall et al., 1978). Policing the Crisis tracks how a racialized
moral panic about muggings in the United Kingdom during the 1970s helped facilitate
the transition to a neoliberal ethos of law and order (Hall et al., 1978). Echoing the con-
clusions of Policing the Crisis, Weber et al. demonstrate the media’s formative role in
advancing these kinds of political agendas; their time series analysis of media reports
from 2007 to 2020 even plots a decisive peak in references to “African gangs”immedi-
ately after Victorian state elections in 2018. Yet, Weber et al. also situate their analysis in
recent literatures on border criminologies to prioritize how this law and order crisis
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(3) 517–526
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231172830
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