Unraveling the Crime-Development Nexus interrogates the claim that crime represents a significant threat to economic development. Combining historical analysis with a unique empirical perspective based on interviews with high-level international crime policy insiders, it accounts for how and why the ‘crime-development nexus’ has been invoked by international actors, including the United Nations, to advance and secure variations of a global capitalist development agenda since the 19th Century.

Drawing on perspectives anchored in critical criminology, International Relations, and development studies, Unraveling the Crime Development Nexus reveals that the international crime policy agenda today remains overwhelmingly responsive to those who benefit from the further expansion of neoliberal globalisation, while simultaneously marginalising subordinate actors throughout the ‘developing’ world.

The book concludes by considering how international organisations, civil society actors, and major donors might support a more equitable and sustainable model of global crime governance that addresses the structural causes of crime and uneven development at a global level.

Introduction

Chapter 1: Is Crime a Development Issue?

Chapter 2: Theorizing Global Crime Governance

Chapter 3: Historicizing the Crime-Development Nexus

Chapter 4: Development and Social Defense

Chapter 5: International Crime in the Crisis Decades

Chapter 6: Securing the Global Capitalist Economy

Chapter 7: Re-Constructing the Crime-Development Nexus

Chapter 8: Global Crime Governance, Rule of Law, and the Sustainable Development Goals

Conclusion: Reimagining the Crime-Development Nexus