ABSTRACT
In sociolegal perspective, ‘crime’ appears as a concept established both politically by ‘official’ processes guaranteed by states and culturally in communal understandings emerging in various kinds of networks of social relations. The dialectic between these determinations of the meaning of crime is long-standing but is assuming increasing complexity as efforts are made to adapt ideas of crime, law, and society to the current proliferation of transnational social relations and jurisdictions. Reliance on nation-states to determine, entirely independently, their own understandings of crime now seems unsatisfactory for many reasons. But how far can crime as an idea be re-envisaged beyond the limits of state jurisdiction and state interests and as the product of transnational networks of community? This chapter notes challenges which transnationalism poses to the monopolisation of criminalisation by states and explores possibilities for coherently conceptualising crime on a transnational basis. It argues that cultural elements in a viable concept of crime indicate bases for – but also necessary limits on – its transnational extension. At the same time, political elements show how hard it is to free the idea of crime from nation-state moorings when it is operationalised in criminal justice practices.
