ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, it was recognized that, in a world permeated with the morally ambiguous postmodern condition, where the boundaries between criminals and non-criminals and legal and illegal activities have become increasingly diffi cult to distinguish, the classic crime control methods of modernity have become increasingly problematic. Some criminologists have thus drawn upon the ‘governmentality’ literature in order to explore the links between contemporary neoliberal political policy and the growing use of ‘actuarial’ or ‘risk-based’ strategies of crime control (Stenson and Sullivan, 2001). This new governmentality thesis refers to ‘the new means to render populations thinkable and measurable through categorisation, differentiation, and sorting into hierarchies, for the purpose of government’ (Stenson, 2001: 22-3). This chapter commences with a consideration of these new modes of governance, the wider notion of the risk society and the threats contained within it, which seem to be a signifi cant outcome of the postmodern condition, and the debates that question the whole notion of a signifi cant break with a penal welfare past, and will conclude by considering the internationalization of crime and risk in terms of globalization, Southern theory and the morally ambiguous notion of terrorism.
