Book Review: Transnational Crime & Criminal Justice
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/2032284418776140 |
| Author | Ermioni Xanthopoulou |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Transnational Crime & Criminal Justice, Marinella Marmo and Nerida Chazal (London, UK: Sage Publications,
2016), ISBN 9781412919258, 240 pp., £23.99
Reviewed by: Ermioni Xanthopoulou, Hertfordshire Law School, UK
DOI: 10.1177/2032284418776140
The effect of globalization on crime and criminal justice poses challenges, with which the disci-
pline of law still has to catch up. From the point of view of a lawyer, the definition of transnational
crime and its impact on criminal justice have yet to be crystallized. The phenomenon of globaliza-
tion and its effect on society and crime render our traditional comprehension of crime and criminal
justice inadequate. This demonstrates how the legal procedure and law enforcement practices have
been left behind the fast evolution of transnational harmful acts which are neither categorized as
domestic nor international crimes. It increasingly becomes clear that resorting to neighbouring
disciplines is necessary to comprehend such emerging, complicated concepts in order to place
them within the spectrum of our existing knowledge. Such expansion, though, into social sciences,
is not an easy task for lawyers. We have our own existing methods of mapping out areas of
knowledge. A criminological introduction to the transnational crime and criminal justice through
the lenses of globalization is therefore necessary for the lawyer who usefully acknowledges the
limits of legal discipline requires this additional lenses to comprehend new fast-evolving problems.
For a European Union (EU) criminal lawyer, particularly, this is an even more imperative need as
EU criminal law is a response to the effects of globalization on crime in a jurisdiction of increased
mobility transcending the nation-state border.
The authors of Transnational Crime & Criminal Justice, aware of the needs of new learners and
their different ways of building on knowledge, have produced a manuscript which serves as a
useful introduction for this audience ranging from students, practitioners to academics. It targets a
broad group of people, coming from different disciplines, career paths and stages of professional
development, who all share, though, a desire to learn more about transnational crime and criminal
justice without immediately immersing themselves to complex theories but wish to develop a
holistic overview of the field, while also understanding underpinning theoretical approaches to
transnational crime and its interdependent relationship with their own discipline. For this reason,
the book is structured in two parts, preceded by an introduction and followed by a concluding
chapter, a glossary, references and index.
The introductory chapter to the book explores some concepts which are necessary to accompany
the study of transnational crime. Th e chapter looks at the globalizatio n of social life and its
complicated impact on crime. The chapter then moves on distinguishing definitions of domestic,
international and transnational crime, before discussing ‘who is in charge’ in relation to crimes
beyond borders. Thus, it offers an overview of the challenged concept of nation-state sovereignty.
Next, the chapter goes on to consider the proliferation of actors ‘who are in charge’ beyond the
state level adding to a sense of global values, which is then placed in the framework of
cosmopolitanism.
The first part of the book offers a theoretical framework by reference to contemporary theories
on crime and justice. Particularly, the reader’s theoretical backdrop is framed by an understanding
of globalization, in light of the increased mobility of people in societies governed by a risk
discourse. The risk is often exacerbated by the new dangers of the uncontrolled virtual space and
is usually minimized by a pre-emptive response at the cost of presumably ‘risky’, vulne rable
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