ABSTRACT
The notion of ‘liquid criminology’, quite contrary to the gradual success and increasing use of its sibling notion of ‘liquid sociology’, has not yet really caught on in contemporary criminology circles. Looking at the Internet for hits, one will be disappointed to discover that only very few criminologists so far have actually written on or even considered the viability of the idea of ‘liquid criminology’. This is quite surprising – especially since the interplay, mutual exchange and open-ended import-export of ideas, perspectives and theories between the disciplines of criminology and sociology in particular have always been prevalent. The idea of ‘liquid sociology’ is obviously closely associated with the work of Zygmunt Bauman (see Davis 2013) who in his seminal book Liquid Modernity suggested that we are currently leaving the ‘solid modernity’ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries behind and entering a time described as ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000). Contrary to solid modernity, liquid modernity heralds a new social habitat in which the securities, certainties and predictabilities of the past are giving way to liquefied, unpredictable and precarious lives lived in a society that is increasingly dismantling everything solid and lasting. This situation challenges and puts a strain on the discipline of sociology, which can no longer rely uncritically on its conventional theories and methods originally developed to study a radically different social environment than the present state of affairs. In many ways, criminology – like sociology – was a golden child of solid modern society sharing with that discipline a quest for control, structure, calculability, security, transparency, predictability, territoriality, stability and not least of all, social order (Bauman 1991).
