New foundations: Pseudo-pacification and special liberty as potential cornerstones for a multi-level theory of homicide and serial murder
| Author | Steve Hall,David Wilson |
| Date | 01 September 2014 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370814536831 |
| Published date | 01 September 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Criminology
2014, Vol. 11(5) 635 –655
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370814536831
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New foundations: Pseudo-
pacification and special liberty
as potential cornerstones for a
multi-level theory of homicide
and serial murder
Steve Hall
University of Teesside, UK
David Wilson
Birmingham City University, UK
Abstract
Over the past 30 years the industrialized West has witnessed a move towards space,
heterogeneity and subjectivity in the criminological study of violence and homicide. Although
large-scale quantitative studies of the temporal and spatial distribution of homicide continue to
provide a broad empirical context, aetiological explanations tend to be based on analyses of the
heterogeneous psychological interactions and experiences of individual subjects at the micro-
level. However, mid-range studies of the temporal and spatial distribution of perpetrators and
victims of homicide between unrelated adults have provided a useful link between the micro-
and macro-levels. Focusing primarily on British homicide and serial murder, this article attempts
to strengthen this link by combining contemporary micro-analyses of the subjective motives
of perpetrators with mid-range analyses of space, which can therefore be seen as part of the
structural tradition of theorizing about homicide and serial murder. Placing these analyses in
a broad underlying context constituted by major historical shifts in political economy and the
cultural forms of ‘pseudo-pacification’ and ‘special liberty’ will lay the initial cornerstones for an
integrated multi-level theory.
Keywords
Homicide, pseudo-pacification, serial murder, space, special liberty, subjectivity, victims
Corresponding author:
Steve Hall, School of Social Sciences & Law, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, TS1 3BA, UK.
Email: steve.hall@tees.ac.uk
536831EUC0010.1177/1477370814536831European Journal of CriminologyHall and Wilson
research-article2014
Article
636 European Journal of Criminology 11(5)
Introduction
The principle put forward near the beginning of the era of ‘radical’ criminology, that we
need a ‘fully social’ theory of deviance (Taylor et al., 1973), now seems inadequate. This
was a premature call to present the sum before its parts were fully understood. We now
know that we need far more detailed knowledge about those parts. Since then many
attempts have been made to break down and integrate ‘the social’ and its structural rela-
tions of class, race, gender and age with other important intersecting dimensions such as
historical process, political economy, culture, space, biography and subjectivity. Even
biology has made something of a comeback, now in a form that is far more enlightened
and sociologically aware than the previous lurches into crude determinism and eugenics
that discredited the overall intellectual project (see Dickens, 2004; Owen, 2012).
However, criminology still experiences difficulty in its attempts to construct theories
of violence that can integrate the main three analytical levels: micro (subjective/psycho-
logical motivations and justifications); meso (local temporal/spatial patterns and cultural
norms); and macro (large-scale historical and spatial patterns in underlying socioeco-
nomic, cultural and political contexts). Previous attempts have produced valuable ideas
but have tended to be rather one-dimensional. For instance, institutional anomie theory
focuses on loss of meaning; differential association and sub-cultural theories focus on
reproduction and excess of meaning; control theories focus on loss of control; general
strain theory focuses on situational loss of opportunities; psychological theories of moti-
vations focus on individual experiences, and so on (see Hall, 2012, and Lilly et al., 2010,
for critical sweeps across the canon of criminological theory). Of the classic theories,
strain theory was probably the most successful in integrating the three analytical levels,
but it lacked an adequate conception of space and inappropriately naturalized the ‘mal-
ady of infinite aspirations’ as the principal condition of subjectivity (Hall, 2012).
Integrated theories, which have been common in criminology and sociology since
Cloward and Ohlin’s (1960) combination of strain, differential association and sub-
cultural theories, have produced some very interesting hybrids with potential for further
development (see Akers and Sellers, 2004). However, this potential is hampered by the
lack of reliable empirical data on all three levels of analysis and the difficulty of con-
structing concepts that are able to integrate these levels. These concepts are often onto-
logically specific to each level and the distinct philosophies and politics that underlie
each traditional theory (see Hall, 2012).
Although violence is a broad and slippery concept, empirical studies of homicide are
useful as a foundation for theoretical integration. Homicide is one of the fundamental
‘consensual crimes’ around which hard-line social constructionist explanations collapse
to reveal a firmer object for empirical and theoretical attention. The vast majority of
homicidal acts are discovered and recorded, thus statistical representations are more reli-
able than those that represent general crime and violence, which are more susceptible to
variations in socially constructed definitions and irredeemably debased by a large esti-
mated ‘dark figure’ of unreported and unrecorded incidents (Brookman, 2005; D’Cruze
et al., 2006). Legal and cultural definitions of homicide are very similar across the
nations and regions of the industrialized West, therefore cross-cultural and temporal
comparisons of statistical rates can be made with more confidence (Barclay et al., 2003).
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