The death penalty in Asia
| Author | David T. Johnson |
| Published date | 01 April 2008 |
| Date | 01 April 2008 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474507087193 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore.
www.sagepublications.com
1462-4745; Vol 10(2): 99–102
DOI: 10.1177/1462474507087193
PUNISHMENT
& SOCIETY
The death penalty in
Asia
Introduction to a Special Issue of
Punishment & Society
DAVID T. JOHNSON
University of Hawaii, USA
A recent essay in this journal lamented ‘how few articles or book reviews appear by
French authors’ (Daems, 2007: 319), but a more important problem in this and related
publications is the dearth of work about punishment and society in Asia, a region that
is home to more than half the planet’s population and to several of the most rapidly
changing societies on earth. This Special Issue introduces readers to some of the English-
language scholarship about the death penalty in Asia. Asia is the regional capital of
capital punishment because that is where more than 90 percent of the world’s judicial
executions occur – the large majority of them in China. Asia also covers a vast
geographic area and a wide variety of cultures, political systems, and capital punish-
ment policies. The geographical focus of this symposium is the jurisdictions of East Asia
– the People’s Republic of China (two articles), Taiwan (one article), and South Korea
(one article). For English-language accounts of capital punishment in Japan, the other
East Asian country most frequently categorized with these three, see my own article in
this journal (Johnson, 2006) and the works cited therein.
The main method employed by the authors in this symposium is the case study of
a single jurisdiction (an exception is the overview by Franklin Zimring and David
Johnson). The limitations of the case study approach need to be acknowledged. Can
one generalize from death penalty developments in East Asian nations to Muslim-
majority societies such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan? What about
nations like Mongolia and Nepal that are not very developed? And how does capital
punishment in East Asia relate to death penalty practice in other retentionist strong-
holds such as the Middle East and the southern United States? Some scholars have
tried to discern the determinants of the death penalty worldwide (Anckar, 2004;
Neumayer, 2006), but in some respects they have had limited success. The case study
approach employed here has two primary virtues: sustained attention to local context,
and the experience that the researchers bring to their studies from having lived and
worked in the contexts about which they write (Flybjerg, 2001).
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PUNISHMENT &...
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