Cascades of violence and a global criminology of place
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Author | John Braithwaite |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865812456857 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
45(3) 299–315
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812456857
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Article
Cascades of violence and a
global criminology of place
John Braithwaite
Australian National University, Australia
Abstract
This research is about the insight that some of the same dynamics may cause war and crime.
Because this is not well understood, national peace agreements sometimes fail to resolve
root causes; violent death is sometimes higher after the peace than during the war. The
second ambition is a macrosociological imagination that opens a new way of seeing global
patterns of crime-war. A third explores what to do about it. Five starting hypotheses toward
a theory of crime-war are advanced:
1. Violence cascades when
(a) Those displaced by violence displace others from spaces to which refugees flee.
(b) Refugee camps become recruiting centres for those who cause violence to cascade.
(c) Hot spots destabilized by successive waves of violence become anomic Hobbesian
vacuums that attract violent tyrannies.
2. Violent crime is highly concentrated at hot spots; twenty-first century warfare is concen-
trated at local hot spots.
3. Peace is accomplished hot spot by hot spot more than nation by nation. Political settle-
ments and a politics of reconciliation are needed to resolve contemporary violence that
are less national, more oriented to a local politics of place .
4. One control policy is a responsive enforcement pyramid that gives violent groups in
control of hot spots an opportunity to negotiate a truce at the base of the pyramid.
When they do, reintegration of perpetrators and shaming of their crimes can occur.
When the opportunity to renounce violence is spurned, firm resolve to escalate to
arrest backed by military capability in the case of armed resistance to arrest is necessary.
Where this resolve is absent, violent hot spots proliferate.
5. Negotiations that persuade violent groups to relinquish control of local hot spots of
criminal opportunity under threat of prosecution will prevent violence more permanently
when accompanied by reconciliation that is followed by reintegration into legitimate
opportunity structures.
Keywords
crime in war, hot spots
Corresponding author:
John Braithwaite, School of Regulation, Justice and Diplomacy, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific, Canberra
ACT 0200, Australia.
Email: John.Braithwaite@anu.edu.au
From displacement to cascades
The spirit of this article is to start with some of the propositions listed in the
abstract that have a fairly high degree of acceptance with the explanation of crime
and to translate them to explanations of war. In the process of translating them
to more general propositions of crime–war, peace studies deliver some productive
insights to criminology as well. The article argues that because violence cascades, it is
imperative that we prevent it before it cascades too much. One reason is that there are
tipping points in cascades of violence (Kennedy, 2009). It also follows that it is mostly a
mistake to fight violence with violence; only rarely is this the best or only recourse
remaining to us. We must focus on fighting it through prevention. Violent means of
pursuing simple policies such as regime change in Iraq or Afghanistan must be tested
critically against the question: ‘What might violence in pursuit of that regime change
cascade to?’
The plan of the article is first to hypothesize that both war and crime are hot-spot
phenomena subject to cascade more than to displacement. Then a case is made for
addressing both forms of violence one hot spot at a time. Mass rape in the Congo is
used to illustrate the dilemmas of crime–war. Cascade dynamics that explain the spread
of militarized violence from one place to another in a place like Congo are then
employed to develop a different kind of theory of patterns of criminal violence in
societies that are not at war.
Criminologists have been insufficiently interested in cascades of violence.
They have been more concerned with violence displacement. This is the idea that if
we extinguish violence at one place, those who have a propensity to violence will
simply move to indulge it at another place. The empirical literature mostly tends
not to reveal displacement effects for violence and crime generally (Weisburd et al.,
2011). If anything, when we extinguish crime at one hot spot of violence, crime also
tends to decline somewhat in surrounding areas. This should have been a clue for crim-
inologists to follow cascades of violence as a more important research question than
displacement of violence. The particular kind of cascade dynamic explored in this article
is violence that spreads horizontally in space from hot spot to hot spot, sometimes
linking one hot spot to another as ink spots that expand and connect up. Elsewhere
my research explores more vertical cascades from the centre to the periphery of the
world system.
A starting point is the hypothesis that there will prove to be analytic value in not
separating the study of cascades of violent crime from cascades of warfare. In the past
year I have conducted the Peacebuilding Compared project in countries such as
Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that continue to be war-
torn. People say it must be dangerous. Perhaps it is not as dangerous as wandering into a
hot spot of crime in a large American city. The 3% of addresses in American cities that
account for 50% of their crime can be genuinely dangerous places (Sherman et al., 1989;
Weisburd, 2012). Yet we wander about the other 97% of high-homicide American cities
in great safety compared to other times and places in human history. Likewise in coun-
tries at war, possibly more than 97% of the locations in space–time are lovely, safe places
to be. So my hypothesis is: Violent crime is highly concentrated at hot spots; warfare is
concentrated at local hot spots.
300 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 45(3)
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