The Architecture of Violence

With The Architecture of Violence, Simon Hallsworth offers criminology not just a paradigm shift, but something closer to a paradigm shove – a shove past criminology’s clean Euclidian categories, and deep into the entangled dynamics of a post-Euclidian criminology. By way of this new paradigm, he reveals a disturbing world of endemic organizational harm and encoded adulteration, a world where official violence emerges from perverse desires and lurid machines. Drawing on cultural criminology to understand these sensualities of institutional violence and control, he in turn usefully reorients cultural criminology’s attention to the affective operations of the powerful. All in all, a book of intellectual daring and dark revelation.

Jeff Ferrell, author of Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

Let’s be honest with ourselves: no one cares about criminology anymore. The discipline has broken into a thousand pieces that for the most part refuse to engage with one another. Most of the fragments that once made up the discipline have turned away from motivation and the root causes of crime and harm. Genuine theoretical work has disappeared, careerism is endemic, inert activism has replaced objectivity, and the contemporary obsession with data isn’t taking us anywhere we haven’t already been.

A good caricature always contains a kernel of truth. There are certainly good reasons for those who love criminology to feel despondent. However, criminology isn’t dead yet. There are still individuals willing to construct new and ambitious frameworks that allow us to better understand the forces that drive conflict, split apart communities, corrode sociability and damage particular individuals and groups. In The Architecture of Violence, Simon Hallsworth reimagines criminology’s topographical order. He proposes the discipline move to a post-Euclidian model that dispenses with the binaries and flat structures that have predominated throughout its history. Hallsworth pushes criminology to accept the entanglements and complexities of the world as it is. Ambitious, far-sighted and beautifully written, this might just be the book that drags criminology out of the mire and refocuses its attention on what truly ails the world.

Simon Winlow, Professor, Northumbria University

This is a typically innovative, bold and provocative body of theorizing from one of our leading scholars spanning the borderlands of criminology, cultural studies and sociology. This book will be of great significance in the growing inter-disciplinary subject areas of state violence and social harm more generally. The book is also very timely and much needed: the current criminological-sociological debate on state power and crimes of the powerful has become somewhat lacking in innovative research-theorizing due in part to the intellectual constraints embedded in the neo-Marxist, zemiological, and post-colonial critical orthodoxies. Simon Hallsworth’s espousal of what he terms a ‘criminology noir’ has great potential to help us both re-think and re-enliven radical debate on violence and the contemporary cultures of control into the 21st century. The text is quite unique and challenging in its paradigmatic claims. The conceptual originality, scope and breadth of this book should guarantee it a global significance for years to come.

Gordon Hughes, author of Crime, Violence and Modernity, and Professor Emeritus in Criminology, Cardiff University, UK

Simon Hallsworth is Emeritus Professor at the University of Suffolk, an established voice in critical criminology. His work spans the study of urban violence, community safety, green criminology, and penal and State theory. He is the author of Street Crime (2005) and The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds (2013).

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