Urban security in Europe: Translating a concept in public criminology
| Author | Gordon Hughes,Adam Edwards,Nicholas Lord |
| Date | 01 May 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370813483386 |
| Published date | 01 May 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
2013
Article
European Journal of Criminology
10(3) 260 –283
Urban security in Europe:
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370813483386
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criminology
Adam Edwards, Gordon Hughes and
Nicholas Lord
Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
A key challenge for public criminology is the translation between concepts employed in
policy discourse and those used by social scientists. Given that concepts constitute social
problems and they can have multiple meanings for policy-makers and social scientists, then
deliberation about what they signify matters in understanding how these actors can talk
to, rather than past, one another in framing policy discourse about crime and revealing
alternative policy agendas. This challenge is accentuated in the comparative context of
European criminology, which is characterized by competing tendencies to generalize about
problems of ‘Freedom, Security and Justice’ and to recognize the variegated problems and
cultures of control across Europe. In this context, the presumption of universality can
mistranslate concepts of crime and control by obscuring contextual insight, while the
presumption of particularity can inhibit cross-cultural dialogue and deliberation. The paper
explores this challenge in relation to the concept of ‘urban security’, which is prevalent in
the policy discourse on social crime prevention, particularly in Central and Southern Europe.
To establish the provenance, prevalence and significance of this concept, the paper discusses
findings from a policy Delphi that structured deliberation about the meaning of urban security
among criminologists sampled from the European Society of Criminology and policy-makers
sampled from the European Crime Prevention Network. It concludes with reflections on the
value of deliberative methods, such as the policy Delphi, for the cross-cultural validation of
criminological constructs in comparative research.
Keywords
Comparative research, policy Delphi, politics of translation, public criminology, urban
security
Corresponding author:
Adam Edwards, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3WT, UK.
Email: EdwardsA2@cardiff.ac.uk
Edwards et al.
261
Introduction
A significant current of thought in contemporary social science is the call for a ‘public
sociology’ (Burawoy, 2005) in which social scientists seek to intervene in public life,
using their particular knowledge and skills to inform and influence public discourse
about social problems. In some countries this mission is also being driven by academic
appraisal and performance management strategies requiring social scientists to demon-
strate the ‘public engagement and impact’ of their work. However, although criminology
has always had a very strong applied tradition, geared to an intense research relationship
with government, commercial and not-for-profit users of social science, it is argued that
‘public criminology’ is confronted with exceptional problems given the party political
and mass media interest in issues of crime control (Loader and Sparks, 2010). In addition
to arguments over the inherently political qualities of criminological research (Hillyard
et al., 2004), electoral and media interest generates a ‘hot’ policy environment that inhib-
its the communicative rationality of social science; insofar as they adopt a scientific
vocation, criminologists’ communication of their research findings is filtered, if not dis-
torted, by the formative intentions of public policy-makers to advance manifestos, culti-
vate electoral support, deliver policy successes within electoral cycles, manage pressure
group and mass media criticism, and so on.1 In response to this, there is an increasing
interest in deliberative methods that can structure dialogue between criminologists and
policy-makers around experience of and expertise about what is, or could be, known
about particular problems rather than around a priori political commitments (Edwards
and Sheptycki, 2009). Deliberative methods offer the prospect of dialogue that is insu-
lated from the more immediate, ad hominem, pressures on the policy process and conse-
quently a more defensible ‘construct validation’ of criminological problems.
Such deliberation presumes, however, the translation of these problems between differ-
ent kinds of social actors in ways that facilitate rather than debilitate dialogue. Opportunities
for mistranslation abound given that the conceptual language of public policy and social
science constitutes social problems in ways that signify different things to different actors,
who can consequently (and often deliberately) talk at, or past, rather than with one another.
More instrumentally, floating signifiers are particularly prevalent in public policy discourse
as competing interests seek to interest, enrol and mobilize support for their version of ‘the
problem’, so defined (see Callon, 1986). An exemplar of this is the policy discourse around
the problem of ‘transnational organized crime’, which has been criticized as a political,
arbitrary construct of post-Cold War foreign policy that obviates much of the social scien-
tific understanding of how serious crimes are organized. Yet the official investment in this
concept is such that the criminological community has been obliged to engage with it in
order to maintain the interest of the policy community (Edwards and Gill, 2002; Edwards
and Levi, 2008). As such, communication between social scientists and policy-makers (as
one significant ‘public’ for social science) is laden with competing interests and dilemmas
that need to be negotiated if dialogue is to continue. For, insofar as social scientists concede
too much to the terms of debate as set by policy-makers, they inhibit their ability to influ-
ence and inform public discourse – to be public criminologists. To not engage with policy-
makers’ terms and concerns, however, runs the risk of disinteresting them and, again,
inhibiting the capacity to influence and inform.
262
European Journal of Criminology 10(3)
To this end, the very terms of debate between academic and policy communities need
to be established as a necessary precursor to constructive dialogue. This is especially the
case in the cross-cultural comparative context of European criminology, which is charac-
terized by competing tendencies to generalize about problems of ‘Freedom, Security and
Justice’ and to recognize the variegated problems and cultures of control across Europe
(Smith, 2004). In this context, the presumption of universality can mistranslate concepts
of crime and control by obscuring contextual insight and ignoring the multiple significa-
tions that general concepts of crime and control can have (Edwards and Hughes, 2005,
2012). In cross-cultural research, mistranslation may also occur as a consequence of
treating concepts as idiographic (originating in a particular social context and only per-
taining to that context) when they may share common referents with alternative concepts
developed in other social contexts. If there are no common referents, there can be no
argument (Bhaskar, 1979). So, in precluding the identification of common referents, idi-
ographic accounts can inhibit cross-cultural dialogue and learning (Karstedt, 2012).
The problems of translation entailed in public criminology and encountered specifi-
cally in the European context are explored in this paper through reference to ‘urban
security’, a concept that has attracted a considerable following, particularly in Central
and Southern Europe and primarily among policy-makers, but which has limited recog-
nition in other European regions and in the social science community. Having estab-
lished the provenance and prevalence of this concept, this paper discusses findings from
a particular kind of deliberative method, a ‘policy Delphi’, which asked a panel of aca-
demics, sampled from the European Society of Criminology (ESC) and a panel of
national policy-makers, sampled from the European Crime Prevention Network
(EUCPN), about the significance of this concept and thus its utility in organizing cross-
national deliberation about crime and insecurity.
The provenance and prevalence of ‘urban security’ in
Europe
The concept of urban security is most obviously associated with the European Forum for
Urban Security (EFUS), established in Barcelona in 1987 on the initiative of Gilbert
Bonnemaison, former French socialist mayor of Epinay-sur-Seine.2 As argued in its two
manifestos, the Naples ‘Cities’ Manifesto’, agreed in 2000 (EFUS, 2000), and the more
recent Aubervilliers and Saint Denis Manifesto on ‘Security, Democracy and Cities’,
agreed in December 2012 (EFUS, 2012), the Forum exists to promote a particular under-
standing of crime and its prevention, one associated with principles of social justice,
interventions driven by social and economic policy as much as by criminal justice and
risk management, and foregrounding the role of municipal authorities as much as police
and criminal justice agencies. As such, the concept is a product of an explicitly political
standpoint within public policy discourse on crime prevention in Europe, one that has
garnered support particularly from Central and Southern Europe.3 The Aubervilliers and
Saint Denis Manifesto reaffirms this...
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