Book Review: Systems of justice in transition: Central European experiences since 1989
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Author | Laura Piacentini |
| DOI | 10.1177/146247450500700113 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
In both cases, however, Valier suggests that negotiation space is left for audiences to
contest officially imposed boundaries of nationality. The following chapters examine the
relationships between punishment, culture and communication in contemporary
societies, and the point is reiterated that official images of crime, victimization and
punishment contain a potential for critical reversal, rather than lead to ‘the resigned
conclusion that media neutralize meaning and wholly emasculate political intervention’
(p. 9). Even [England’s notorious] Moors murderers, in Valier’s analysis, became cult
figures for the alternative art and music scene, ‘appropriated into a counter-cultural chal-
lenge to mainstream values’ (p. 137). Did the Sex Pistols not sing that no one is
innocent?
The demolition of Foucault, as that of functionalism a few decades back, is almost
becoming an initiation rite of passage into sociological maturity or, at least, originality.
And yet when questioned about the lack in his work of any notion of cultural contes-
tation and social conflict, Foucault argued that both had plenty of space in his panoptic
depiction of power: the more ‘dominance’ pervades the minute recesses of life, he said,
the more pervasive the opportunities to fight it. His argument, of course, alluded to the
fact that no ‘central locus of contestation’ could be invested with leading function of
generating social change. When asked about the lack of Marxist notions of conflict in
his theories, he candidly replied that Marx, to him, was like Newton, namely engrained
part of our cultural legacy, whose conceptualizations need not be repeatedly mobilized:
we do not need to be constantly reminded that if we let go of an object this will fall,
due to a force attracting it to centre of the earth. Valier’s book, however, will be of great
interest to colleagues and students who look at crime images as embroiled in a mixture
of social fact, communicative strategy, contested perception and mediated phenomenon.
What has been termed ‘cultural criminology’ may include it in its increasingly rich
production. Those who will not find sentences such as the following too verbose will
enjoy, along with the content, also the style of this book: ‘this deadly nostalgia haunts
the sociologized concept of ontological insecurity, and the narratives of decivilizing anti-
modern trends, posited sometimes as explanatory of the punitive turn. Such nostalgia
inadvertently commits blackmail against the future’ (p. 147).
Vincenzo Ruggiero
Middlesex University, UK and University of Pisa, Italy
Systems of justice in transition: Central European experiences since 1989, Jiri Priban,
Pauline Roberts and James Young (eds). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. ix + 231 pp. ISBN
0–7546–23173 (hbk).
The criminal justice systems of the post-Communist European countries are in tran-
sition. The collapse of the USSR in 1991 exposed many problems concerning the allo-
cation and administration of criminal justice in the Soviet bloc, not least because, until
very recently, criminal justice policy and performance, jurisprudence, and constitutional
and civil law, were fixed to the peculiar versions of Marxist/Leninist legal theory that
were promulgated under successive Soviet dictators and general secretaries. However,
over the short space of 13 years, legal experts involved in the transformation process in
those countries have begun to develop democratic and legitimate frameworks for their
BOOK REVIEWS
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