Global Crime Ethnographies: Three Suggestions for a Criminology That Truly Travels

Abstract

This chapter proposes a novel ethnographic approach to global crime/criminology—an approach centered on the following four main points: (1) an attentiveness to how global dynamics afford criminal flows and transnational figurations; (2) a theoretical and methodological sensibility that moves beyond methodological nationalism; (3) a research design that follows criminal flows, rather than merely investigating their starting, middle, or endpoints; and (4) an approach that takes flows to constitute the spatial criminal(ized) phenomena being research, rather than being epiphenomenal to such crime. In criminology, looking at a growlingly globalized world of crime and criminalization, there have been increasing calls for a globalization of criminological methods and theories—or for a “criminology that travels.” With such calls in mind, following the four points may be what is needed to make criminology sufficiently itinerant in a global day and age.