Research

 

You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.

Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
 

Books: Research

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This chapter explores issues of crime, deviancy, conflict and victimisation as these pertain to the planet’s southern continent. The discussion centres on harm and how these are manifested at local levels through to global levels. Transgressions that cause harm have ramifications for the health and well-being of humans, ecosystems, and plants and animals, not only within the environs of Antarctica but worldwide. The chapter maps out different types of harm, for example, those affecting the Antarctic continent itself, such as pollution and waste, and global warming, and the impacts these are having on endemic non-human animals as well as the biotic communities of the Southern Ocean, not to mention rising seas and shifts in climatic conditions generally. It also examines the nature of transgressions involving humans who live and work in the Antarctic, and the harms that emerge within communities and between colleagues in such remote and physically harsh environments. Antarctica is increasingly important to world powers, as reflected in contemporary debates over the Antarctic Treaty. There are also heightened conservation concerns about the state of the Antarctic as a nature reserve, intricate ecosystem and unique biophysical space. For rural criminology, Antarctica presents profound challenges for research, horizon scanning and strategic intervention.

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Rural criminology scholarship as an area of concentrated study across Oceania is scattered. For work theorising and with an empirical research focus, literature from Australia dominates, although it has been somewhat ad hoc with an emphasis on localised case studies as opposed to broader bodies of research. Scholarship pertaining to rurality and crime in New Zealand is yet to emerge, although there has been some work on rural policing specifically. Focused research aimed at developing understandings about rurality and crime in the South Pacific context are not yet visible in existing literature. Adopting a hybridised theoretical approach, this chapter charts the notion of ‘access to justice’ and addresses seven specific access issues throughout Oceania, assessing how access can be conceived, measured and responded to in regional, rural and remote areas. While reflecting on the existing canon of relevant works, the chapter will also look to the future ‘state of the art’, nominating areas for new scholarship pertaining to access to justice across the region.

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Rural criminology in Asia emerges as a crucial field due to the continent’s vast and diverse rural landscape, significant global demographic presence, and distinct and multifarious criminogenic factors. With 49 countries and six distinct sub-regions characterised by unique cultural, linguistic and ethnic traits, Asia’s rural areas face various social, economic and cultural challenges to a different extent. There are also political instability, despotism, political violence, weak law and governance, regional political conflicts and communal violence. Moreover, there are diverse legal traditions, crimes, and crime control and justice mechanisms. These factors profoundly influence crime and justice dynamics in Asia. Despite this rich societal, economic, geographical, cultural and legal philosophical diversity in Asia and its criminogenic factors, its contribution to criminological literature, especially in rural contexts, remains muted compared to Western counterparts. Drawing upon existing criminological literature, this chapter presents a modest picture of rural criminology in Asia, but it acknowledges that a comprehensive understanding of distinct criminal behaviour and justice systems in Asia’s rural context still remains elusive. Limited access to pertinent data and local-language criminological research further impedes this understanding. Therefore, future rural criminologists have immense opportunities to explore and address these identified and unexplored challenges in understanding rural crime and justice in Asia.

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This chapter surveys the range of themes that constitute the ‘state of the art’ in present rural criminology in Europe. Through this thematic lens, as opposed to an analysis of criminology in the regions of Europe, we map out the strengths, limitations, opportunities and prospects for rural criminology on the continent. We undertook a bibliographic review of rural criminology in Europe, first by searching the literature using Google Scholar with some simple and obvious search terms of crime, rural, criminology, policing, crime prevention, criminal justice, research and names of European countries. Publications in Web of Science, Scopus and JSTOR databases were automatically included. To organise the discussion, the chapter broadly adopts a thematic structure to capture writing on rural crime in various dimensions: criminal justice institutions, but with a particular focus on rural policing, and reflecting on theorising in rural criminology, based upon rural cases.

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State of the Art on the World’s Continents
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This timely collection crosses international boundaries to highlight criminological issues with a rural focus. Using a variety of different perspectives, the contributors offer lessons from research on rural crime, justice and security from the seven continents with a macroscopic perspective on issues of international concern.

The book identifies the global context in which rural crime takes place, presenting insights on crime prevention, safety and security to students, researchers, policymakers and practitioners.

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This chapter discusses the emerging themes from the chapters in this book, capturing the global state of the art in rural criminology. This final chapter sets out the basic schema that helps us to build theory from each contribution and discusses some emerging critical issues. Some key points of note are that criminology in the Southern Hemisphere, for example, has very different concerns than criminology in Europe and North America. The history of colonialism has shaped the map in criminology and criminal justice particularly, but not exclusively, in the Global South. There are also differences in state formation and the uneven dispersal of formal justice systems that might be taken for granted in parts of the developed world.

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This chapter aims to present an overview of the field of rural criminology in South America by discussing two decades of publications on crime and safety in rural areas. The search for relevant literature was guided by a Southern criminology perspective and conducted using the Scopus database, resulting in the retrieval of 716 documents from various fields. From these, approximately 71 articles from criminology journals were pre-selected for detailed analysis, ultimately leading to the inclusion of 35 articles in this review. Contributions to the field of rural criminology have been irregular and fragmented in terms of topics, theory development, and engagement with policy and practices, with many of the most important understandings of rural crime, resistance and justice coming from an array of other disciplines, from political science, to economics, anthropology and human geography. New developments in the field promise a stronger period for rural criminology and highlight the importance of understanding the connections between the rural and urban in an increasingly conflicting globalised world.

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We live in a world that is greatly interconnected and our thinking since the latter end of the last century and the early decades of the first, has focused on trying to capture social and cultural life on a wider global scale. Zooming out to the continental scale presents opportunities to gain a more global perspective but is not without its controversy, epistemological limitations or indeed politics within the social sciences. The continental scale has been one way in which ecological science has, for some time, sought to deal with greater acceleration of global climate change (Peters et al, 2008). So, too, rural criminology, as an emerging sub-discipline within the broader criminological enterprise, has focused primarily on examining crime, deviance and criminal justice as it relates to remote areas with dispersed populations. It behoves us to begin to think beyond national boundaries and to extend our criminological imagination to wider scales. This chapter sets the scene for the chapters to come in the book, highlighting the variations in analytic and thematic approaches that the chapter authors have taken.

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This chapter delves into the relatively underexplored realm of rural criminology in Africa, highlighting the scarcity of research in this field and the limited visibility of Southern scholars, leading to a significant gap in understanding crime within rural and agrarian cultures. A qualitative content analysis method was employed, reviewing 119 publications from 16 African countries since 2008. These works were categorised based on publication year, geographic location, definitions of rurality, applied theories and prevalent crime types. The chapter explores challenges in studying rural crime, discussing the historical development of rural criminology in Africa and the complexities in defining rurality in this context. Additionally, it scrutinises policing strategies and their implications concerning social, economic and political factors unique to these regions. The research underscores the need for interdisciplinary approaches urging the application of critical criminology to challenge conventional perspectives. The chapter identifies gaps in existing studies and proposes recommendations for future research on rural crime in Africa.

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This first chapter of the state of the art of rural criminology in North America, examines key issues in rural crime studies in Canada, the Caribbean and the United States. Unfortunately, on this occasion it leaves out consideration of rural crime in Mexico and various Central American countries. Nonetheless, this chapter demonstrates the extent to which rural people and rural communities in North America are challenged by issues related to safety and security. Of particular significance for rural studies of crime in North America are problems associated with farm crime, violence against women and substance production, trafficking and use, and policing crime in areas with fewer people but large geographies. The chapter makes note of the fact that scholarly attention to rural crime studies has emerged over past the several decades, even as North America itself and most of the rest of the world has increasingly urbanised.

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