Development as a historical component of the United Nations’ crime policy agenda: From social defence to the Millennium Development Goals
| Author | Tom Chodor,Nathan W Pino,Jarrett Blaustein |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819877453 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1748895819877453
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 21(4) 435 –454
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895819877453
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Development as a historical
component of the United
Nations’ crime policy
agenda: From social
defence to the Millennium
Development Goals
Jarrett Blaustein
Tom Chodor
Monash University, Australia
Nathan W Pino
Texas State University, USA
Abstract
This article presents a historical analysis of the intellectual and institutional origins of the international
community’s interest in the link between crime and development leading up to the adoption of
the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Drawing on a combination of documentary sources
and interviews with long-time international crime policy insiders, it traces this interest back to the
United Nations’ social defence agenda which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War.
We situate this agenda in relation to the Western aspiration to advance the Modernization project
and reflect on how its shortcomings together with ideological, economic and geopolitical shifts at
the international level contributed to the diversification of the United Nations’ crime policy agenda
during the 1970s. These conditions collectively influenced the international community’s growing
concern with crime as an existential threat to economic development during the 1980s. Our
analysis highlights how this framing was reinforced by the rise of transnational organized crime as
a threat to global capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was against this historical
backdrop that the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention was established
to lead the international community’s fight against ‘uncivil society’. We conclude by reflecting on
United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention’s tumultuous early years along with
Corresponding author:
Jarrett Blaustein, Monash University, 20 Chancellors Walk, Clayton, VIC 3800, Australia.
Email: Jarrett.Blaustein@Monash.Edu
877453CRJ0010.1177/1748895819877453Criminology & Criminal JusticeBlaustein et al.
research-article2019
Article
436 Criminology & Criminal Justice 21(4)
the omission of ‘crime’ from the Millennium Development Goals and suggest that these conditions,
along with the adoption of the United Nations Conventions Against Transnational Organized
Crime and Corruption, set the stage for the organization’s future advocacy for the inclusion of
crime in the Sustainable Development Goals.
Keywords
Crime-development nexus, global crime, global governance, Sustainable Development Goals,
United Nations
Introduction
Crime prevention has only recently gained formal recognition as a global sustainable
development priority (see Blaustein et al., 2018) but development has long featured as
an important thematic component of the United Nations’ (UN) crime policy agenda.
This article sets out to document how the UN’s framing of the relationship between
crime and development evolved from the aftermath of the Second World War to the
adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and accounts for various fac-
tors that contributed to key shifts.1 Our historical analysis is based on our reading of
more than 200 publicly available primary source documents that provide an official
record of UN crime policy activities and priorities since 1947/1948. We further supple-
mented our reading of these documents with data from oral history interviews con-
ducted with 17 veteran UN crime policy insiders who occupied senior leadership or
advisory roles between the early 1970s and 2018.
Noting that development was not a major thematic component of the international crime
policy agenda under the League of Nations (Knepper, 2011), we begin by reflecting on the
theoretical assumptions that underpinned the establishment of the UN’s Social Defence
Section of the Secretariat in the late 1940s. Specifically, we account for how a prevailing
belief in the Modernization thesis together with the criminological theories of the Chicago
School influenced the work of the Social Defence Section and their efforts to develop an
international knowledge base to combat the anticipated criminological consequences of
rapid industrialization and urbanization throughout the recently decolonized Global South.
Noting the financial difficulties of the Social Defence Section, we then proceed to consider
how and why the discursive framing of the relationship between crime and development
evolved throughout the 1970s and 1980s in response to the following: declining institu-
tional support for the Social Defence Section, political developments associated with the
rise of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), advances in criminological theory
and the gradual and uneven spread of neoliberal ideology. We argue that these factors col-
lectively contributed to the diversification and internationalization of the UN’s crime pol-
icy agenda and an important shift in how the UN framed the relationship between crime
and development from the 1980s onwards. Henceforth, crime was treated predominantly as
a threat to economic and later social development.
With the remainder of the article, we reflect on how the emergence of transnational
organized crime as the overarching focus of the UN’s crime policy agenda since the 1990s
helped to solidify this understanding of crime as a threat to development. We argue that this
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