ABSTRACT
This chapter arises out of a recent debate in which I have been involved with Kit Carson with regard to the embattled possibilities of a progressive realist politics around communalism in the field of crime prevention-cum-community safety (Carson 2004a,b; Hughes, 2004a). In my rejoinder to Kit Carson’s powerful critique of communalism in this policy field I suggested that a major ‘provocation’ for critical criminology was the issue of how to imagine and ‘translate’ (Callon, 1986) a replacement discourse on community safety around the volatile politics of migration and asylum-seeking and the new mobilities and diasporas of late modernity. It is to this ‘wicked issue’ in the contemporary politics of safety and security that I wish to return here. I am also writing this chapter in January 2005 in the aftermath of the almost apocalyptic ‘natural’ (but also profoundly economic, political and social) disaster of the earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean that is already resulting in a mass refugee problem. It is striking in the United Kingdom that the same news media which have systematically and voraciously denigrated and vilified the asylum seeker/refugee over the past decade are now calling for humanitarian compassion and charity to those people left bereft by the tidal waves. It will be sobering and possibly chilling to observe how the climate of opinion may change should the homeless and traumatised survivors decide that migration to the affluent western societies may be their only option for security and safety.
