Sociology & Criminology for a Changing World
Policing does not simply mean the police. While the police are the most visible and influential agents of policing, the term refers more broadly to the diverse practices and institutions through which authority is exercised to maintain security, enforce laws, and regulate everyday life. Social order, in turn, describes the stability of social interactions, guided
Criminal justice refers to the institutions, processes, and practices by which societies respond to crime, including policing, courts, and corrections. Due process, by contrast, is the principle that ensures the protection of individual rights and liberties against arbitrary state power. Together, they reflect one of the central tensions of modern legal systems: the balance between
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor is a groundbreaking work by political scientist and technologist Virginia Eubanks. Published in 2018, the book examines the rise of automated decision-making systems in public service sectors such as welfare, housing, and child protection. Eubanks argues that these technologies disproportionately target and penalize poor
Stephen Graham’s „Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism“ (2010) is a disturbing yet influential work that analyzes the creeping militarization of urban spaces. Against the backdrop of the “War on Terror” and a globalized security architecture, Graham shows how military logics, technologies, and control practices increasingly permeate everyday life in Western cities. The book
In her book Security (2009), British legal scholar and criminologist Lucia Zedner offers a normatively sensitive, interdisciplinary, and conceptually precise analysis of the notion of security. She shows that “security” is not an objective or neutral good, but rather a complex social construction that is mobilized differently in politics, criminal law, and society. Zedner’s work
Enforcing Order, written by French anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin, is a dense ethnographic study of everyday policing in the French banlieues. Based on several years of participant observation within an anti-crime brigade (BAC), Fassin reveals how police act as instruments of control and social exclusion in marginalized urban areas. The study is not only