Book Review: The Routledge Handbook of Justice and Home Affairs Research
| DOI | 10.1177/2032284419880635 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Author | Élisa Narminio |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
The Routledge Handbook of Justice and Home Affairs Research, Ariadna Ripoll Servent and Florian Trauner
(eds.) (London: Routledge, 2017), ISBN 9781138183759, 494 pp., £170
Reviewed by: ´
Elisa Narminio, Universit ´
e Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Waseda University, Japan
DOI: 10.1177/2032284419880635
Justice and Home Affairs (JHA) is a distinctive piece of ‘Eu ro-jargon’ referring to questions
pertaining to internal security and justice matters in the European Union (EU). JHA covers a
particularly sensitive area, as it is at the heart of States’ sovereignty. Furthermore, as a policy
field, JHA has recently come under increasing stress as it is rocked by ever more acrimonious
debates over the management of migration flows, border controls and terrorist threats. This hand-
book brings together key concepts, debates and central questions by leading European Studies
scholars on the umbrella concept of JHA in the EU. The term JHA refers to the third pillar of the
EU’s legal structure between 1993 and 2009, which was centred on criminal law and security
issues. This is not to be confused with the current EU Area of freedom, security and justice (AFSJ),
which ‘refers rather to a goal set by the [European] treaties designing the ideal shape that European
integration should take’, where cooperation revolves around criminal, migration and civil law. The
title of the book grounds the debate in the EU’s handling of security and criminal issues; the editors
have chosen to place particular emphasis on to the question of immigration. Unprecedented in its
scope and focus, it is a necessary contribution to a field of research and study bereft of overarching
reference materials. The handbook compellingly outlines the central evolutions and challenges
currently faced by JHA in the EU’s internal and extern al dimensions, not least the increased
communitization of these areas that had previously been strongholds for the sovereign power of
States. It provides many sharp, concurrently broad-based and in-depth analyses of the key areas of
research in the field. Interestingly, it articulates theory-oriented and policy-orientated papers, it
features findings grounded in different fields and disciplines – criminal law, human rights, migra-
tion studies, political science, international relations, and includes various theoretical positivist and
post-positivist traditions. This in turn allows readers to uncover hitherto little explored connections
between the various issues raised by the handbook’s numerous chapters. The discussion would
however have benefitted from a greater critical stance on the possible biases introduced by the
prevalence of security-related issues in the EU’s agenda on JHA, to the detriment of a more justice
and human rights focused approach.
Published just one year before the 2019 European elections, the explicit project underpinning
the handbook is to be a ‘referent for scholars, practitioners and students interested in the area of
justice, home affairs and European politics’ to provide an analytical counterbalance to the politi-
cization of EU integration through discourses on JHA. The 493 pages and 39 chapters of the book
New Journal of European Criminal Law
2019, Vol. 10(4) 421–427
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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