Fighting terror with law? Some other genealogies of pre-emption

Within criminology and criminal law the reception of post-9/11 counter-terrorist law has generally been critical, if not hostile. The undeniable proliferation of preventive statutes has been regarded as incompatible with conventional liberal norms and as dangerously innovative in its embrace of new strategies of control. But is such law innovative, and does it threaten to leach into other areas of criminal law, as some have feared? Exploring three governmental innovations – mental health law, habitual criminal controls, and civilian internment in war-time – that developed as expressions of the liberal state’s desire to ensure the safety of its citizens in times of peace and war, the authors argue that a more historically grounded understanding of the governmental and geopolitical contexts of security provides a surer foundation on which to construct the frameworks of interpretation of contemporary counter-terrorism law

‘Upholding the Cause of Civilization’: The Australian Death Penalty in War and Colonialism

The abolition of the death penalty in Queensland in 1922 was the first in Australian jurisdictions, and the first in the British Empire. However, the legacy of the Queensland death penalty lingered in Australian colonial territories. This article considers a variety of practices in which the death penalty was addressed by Australian decision-makers during the first half of the 20th century. These include the exemption of Australian soldiers from execution in World War I, use of the death penalty in colonial Papua and the Mandate Territory of New Guinea, hanging as a weapon of war in the colonial territories, and the retrieval of the death penalty for the punishment of war crimes. In these histories, we see not only that the Queensland death penalty lived on in other contexts but also that ideological and political preferences for abolition remained vulnerable to the sway of other historical forces of war and security

Speculating about genocide: The Queensland frontier 1859–1897

In the colonisation of Queensland, Australia it is commonly accepted that large numbers of Indigenous people were killed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Calculations of violent mortality have recently been revised radically upwards. We suggest that the methodology deployed in these new studies is unreliable, reflecting errors in counting and calculation, as well as underestimating the selection bias of the samples. We caution against projecting aggregate violent mortality where the underlying data are so imperfect and emphasise the value of more detailed local and regional studies to inform better understanding of colonisation\u27s impact on First Peoples

S.W. Griffith: A Suitable Case for Indictment?

In his 2021 book ‘Truth-Telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement’, Henry Reynolds called for an inquiry into the historical record of Samuel Walker Griffith, Federation ‘father’ and first Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia. Reynolds’ iconoclasm targeted a historical figure whose name is memorialised in a Riverina town, a Canberra suburb and a Queensland university. Reynolds charged that Griffith was morally and politically responsible for the violence carried out by an agency of the Queensland government, the Native Police. This historically grounded allegation relates to Griffith\u27s pre-Federation Queensland political career, 1874–93, when he served intermittently as Premier, Attorney-General and Colonial Secretary. In this article we consider the historical record of S.W. Griffith as law-maker and ministerial decision-maker, asking what elements of fact and context may be brought to the important work of reckoning with a violent colonial past and its memorialisation in the present

Ian O’Donnell and Finbarr McAuley, Criminal Justice History: themes and controversies from pre-Independence Ireland

To speak of pre-independence Ireland and criminal justice in the one breath could once mean only one thing – the uses of state power in defence of the authority of the ascendancy. Ireland under the Union was more often ruled in a state of emergency than of normality. The political conflict of the period and the social catastrophes of famine and mass emigration suggested a context in which agents of criminal justice played a role largely focussed on the maintenance of social order in the inter..

Patrick Carroll-Burke, Colonial Discipline: the Making of the Irish Convict System

This challenging book argues that half a century ahead of the date postulated by David Garland (in Punishment and welfare, 1985) as the point of emergence of the modern English penal system with its emphasis on individualisation, Ireland already had such a system in place. The reasons, suggests the author, have to do with the colonial character of the government of Ireland. The political context of managing Irish dissent and rebellion demanded at the same time innovation – and the privilege o..

Crime and Criminal Justice Research: Australia and its Region

Research on crime and criminal justice history for Australia and its region is almost entirely restricted chronologically to the period since 1788. That was the year when transported convicts sentenced in England first landed at their destination in Botany Bay. The geo-temporal location of the area “Australia and its region” is one defined initially by the region’s imperial and colonial histories. The dominant imperial power was Britain, and its proxies, the British-populated settler colonies..

Peter Hart, The I.R.A. and its enemies: violence and community in Cork, 1916-1923

In this outstanding excavation of the ground-level struggles of a war of independence, Peter Hart leaves the worst to last. We are not left to celebrate the heroics of the young men (mostly, but women too) who found themselves caught up in a tide of escalating violence, but rather to ponder the awfulness of vendettas pursued against ‘neighbours and enemies’. For as Ireland stumbled from war into truce and treaty and then the civil war of recalcitrant republicans against treaty compromisers, t..

A decline in violence in Ireland ? Crime, policing and social relations, 1860-1914

The image of Ireland as a place of violence in the 19th and early 20th century draws much substance from the phenomena of agrarian and political conflict. A study of Irish crime statistics in the later 19th century (1860-1914) suggests however that Ireland like many other societies at the time enjoyed a secular decline in interpersonal violence.The study examines trends in police charges for a number of offences as well as data relating to suicide and mental illness before suggesting further lines of enquiry into the history of crime in Ireland.La représentation de l'Irlande comme un espace violent au 19e et au début du 20e siècles découle en grande partie des conflits agraires et politiques. L'étude des statistiques pénales irlandaises à la fin du 19e siècle (1860-1914) donne cependant à penser que l'Irlande, tout comme beaucoup d'autres sociétés, a connu à l'époque un déclin séculaire de la violence interpersonnelle. Cette recherche étudie l'évolution des mises en accusation par la police pour diverses catégories d'infractions, ainsi que les données relatives au suicide et à la maladie mentale, avant de proposer d'autres pistes de recherche concernant l'histoire de la criminalité en Irlande

Death Penalty Politics: The Fragility of Abolition in Asia and the Pacific

This special collection of articles on the death penalty and the politics of abolition in Asia and the Pacific is published to coincide with the centenary of one of the world’s earliest statutory abolitions, in the Australian state of Queensland, in August 1922. Scholars of the death penalty, its practice and its abolition were invited to participate in a symposium in May 2021 hosted in Melbourne by Eleos Justice at Monash University and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. They were joined by lawyers and abolition advocates, including some who had worked on death row cases. This collection seeks to bring perspectives from a variety of disciplines and methods—historical, legal, sociological, comparative—to bear on the questions of retention and abolition in a variety of jurisdictions and time periods. If there is one conclusion to these collective studies, it is the fragility of abolition. Abolition may now be widely embraced as a norm of international human rights law, but its establishment as a comprehensive and irrevocable fact remains elusive. The task of a research collection such as this is to understand why that may be as a guide to what might be pursued in the future regarding abolition