Clifford Shearing

University of Cape Town | UCT

The article explores how criminology is responding to, and might respond to, the challenges presented by changes in earth systems, and the reasons for them, that the term ‘Anthropocene’ signals. It begins with a very brief review of these developments and the meaning of the term. It then examines the responses within criminology that have emerged u...

South Africa is often held up as an enviable example of a country that avoided a full-blown civil war. Twenty years into the new constitutional democracy, however, the continuation of social conflict and criminal violence begs the question as to whether South Africa deserves to be described as “postconflict.” In this article, we take stock of conte...

In this chapter we explore the history of “crime” and “security” and how it is that “security” has begun to move closer to the centre of the criminological stage. Central to these developments, we will argue, has been criminology’s “utilitarian” character, which Foucault so caustically depreciates, and the way in which its “use-inspired” (Stokes, 1...

Increasing levels of the unsustainable use of natural resources have been widely reported. In this paper we argue that engaging private sector corporations to address environmental risks is crucial to solving many of the key environmental challenges humans face. We investigate the enabling conditions under which private sector corporates act to res...

South Africa has had a comprehensive crime prevention policy agenda for some time in the form of the 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy and the 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security. Despite this, prevention has remained very much a second cousin within the South African criminal justice family, notwithstanding the fact that there is widespr...

This article reflects on the proliferation of novel forms of private urban security governance assemblages, specifically the roles of private auspices and providers in responding to contemporary climate-related socio-material harmscapes. The authors use the lens of climatic harms and associated discursive shifts in understandings of the relationshi...

Darrel Stephens came into prominence in the 1980s as an American Police leader with vision. He attained chief executive positions in significant police organizations and was recognized as an agent of change. He was an early and strong proponent of police-research partnership, what we now call evidence-based policing. He was a deep thinker about the...

Ethnographies of policing have overwhelmingly focused on the work of traditional security actors, namely the public police, in local communities. By comparison, ethnographic research on the poly-centric and multi-scalar networks of power that govern and provide security around the world remains a rarity despite increased theoretical interest in nod...

This article delves into the relationship between policing and public health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The police have been seen as a crucial and extensively mobilised resource that has been utilised in responding to a public health crisis. The response to the pandemic shows the police mainly as enforcing state orders in which they h...

This chapter sets out to consider the role of police when it comes to managing the human security impacts of acute natural disaster events which are expected to occur more frequently due to climate change. To this effect, it sets out to conceptualise traditional governmental policing actors as part of wider emergency management webs which work to p...

Ethnographies of policing have overwhelmingly focused on the work of traditional security actors, namely the public police, in local communities. By comparison, ethnographic research on the poly-centric and multi-scalar networks of power that govern and provide security around the world remains a rarity despite increased theoretical interest in nod...

Through analysis of examples in the United States and Canada and a case study on Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, this article explores the impacts of natural disasters on critical infrastructures, as well as the barriers and levers to create resilient infrastructures in the Anthropocene, a geological epoch in which complex interconnections and inte...

We use a broad range of material such as policy outlines, academic literature, and journalistic research to look at the impacts of natural disasters on critical infrastructures as well as on developments in creating resilient infrastructures, focusing on examples in the United States and Canada with a focus on a case study on Hurricane Maria in Pue...

This chapter sets out to consider the role of police when it comes to managing the human security impacts of acute natural disaster events which are expected to occur more frequently due to climate change. To this effect, it sets out to conceptualise traditional governmental policing actors as part of wider emergency management webs which work to p...

This special issue pays tribute to the life and work of David Hume Bayley, professor emeritus in the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany, who passed away in May of 2020 at the age of 87. We regard Bayley as the world’s pre-eminent comparative policing scholar. In this introduction to the special issue, we begin by providing a bri...

The 40th Anniversary Edition of Taylor, Walton and Young’s New Criminology, published in 2013, opened with these words: ‘The New Criminology was written at a particular time and place, it was a product of 1968 and its aftermath; a world turned upside down’. We are at a similar moment today. Several developments have been, and are turning, our 21st...

Inclusive energy access remains elusive globally. Centrally planned energy infrastructures tend to neglect mar-ginalised and disparate populations while upfront costs make it rare for lower-income actors to adopt off-grid renewable energy. This article identifies one emerging response by low-income actors to secure access to through solar photovolt...

Policing in much of the developing world has always been, in many respects, both dominated by the nonstate and pluralised. Yet, plurality and the nonstate are predominantly conceptualised, by scholars and practitioners alike, as problematic, noninclusive and/or undemocratic. Yet the reality is far more complex than this. In this chapter, we turn th...

This book explores the role of the insurance industry in contributing to, and responding to, the harms that climate change has brought and will bring either directly or indirectly. The Anthropocene signifies a new role for humankind: we are the only species that has become a driving force in the planetary system. What might criminology be in the An...

This book arises at a time when our skies are dark, and are becoming darker. There is now irrefutable evidence that the temperate era of the last 12, 000 years, the Holocene era, is drawing to a close. We are moving towards a series of tipping points that could well bring an end to the nurturing ‘ecological assemblages’ (Trisos, Merow and Pigot, 20...

This article will reflect on the multiple ways in which private security can, and is, being held responsible and accountable to the public (and other security providers), in formalised, polycentric, or nodal assemblages. Drawing on empirical research conducted on plural policing partnerships, the article will show that private security is influence...

Significant developments in our understandings of, and thinking about, “policing” have occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These have been reflected in redefinitions of the words “police” and “policing” that scholars use when writing about it. By the middle of the 19th century the word "police" in English was understood to refer to...

The question that this article considers is the question of citizenship and, in particular, ‘citizenship that is responsible and innovative’. Citizenship has not, for the most part, been an explicit focus of attention across John’s corpus. Yet, as my colleague Cameron Holley has reminded me, citizenship, and the issues surrounding it, have constitu...

The chapter focuses on three interrelated concerns - the role of idealised understandings of masculinity in the framing of mental health and the treatment thereof, the barriers to help reinforced by stigma and the rhetoric of weakness and the pragmatic lack of sustained and organised mental health services offered internally to members of the South...

This article extends ecological framings of resilience into socio-ecological and governance domains for urban infrastructure managers concerned with climate risk. Under moments of disruption, reliable and equitable access to adequate provision of public goods is anticipated to be increasingly challenging in cities across the world due to observed a...

This chapter uses a desktop study to examine the insurance industry’s potential as a ‘fulcrum institution’ that can influence others to prevent and address environmental harms from climate change. As this chapter demonstrates, given insurance’s central economic role, the relationship between insurers and climate change is complicated and conflicted...

We explore why and how corporations seek to build community resilience as a strategic response to grand challenges. Based on a comparative case study analysis of four corporations strategically building community resilience in five place-based communities in South Africa, as well as three counterfactual cases, we develop a process model of corporat...

Illustrating how mentalities govern private responses to risk, this article highlights the importance of mental frames in the selection of adaptation pathways. Scholarship emanating out of the Cape Town drought (2015–2018) has drawn attention to the effect of the drought on public mentalities and their response to the drought, transitional governan...

Achieving a radical and swift transition to low carbon renewable energy is a pressing global challenge. Yet, energy transitions continue to confront numerous obstacles. Dominant private and public players persistently slow or block change. Controversial hydrocarbon bridging fuels, like unconventional gas, also continue to expand in the name of ener...

Unconventional gas has quickly become a significant energy resource and a site of contestation over the nature and outcome its regulatory processes. Central to this contest are issues of power and capture and the implications for achieving sustainable energy regulation. The influence of dominant industry players can be a serious obstacle for transi...

This review explores past and future shifts in policing and criminology scholarship that have shaped, and been shaped by, what is done to enhance safety within political domains. Investigating established policing conceptualizations, the review demonstrates how the ideal of state-delivered safety as a public good was challenged by a sizeable polici...

This article explores responses to one type of climate risk, severe water scarcity, during Cape Town's drought from 2016 to mid-2018. Advancing our understanding of how societies can cope and develop despite disruptions, it considers how selected pathways shaped noteworthy response diversity to mitigate the impact and potential harms associated wit...

Rectifying the fact that little criminological attention has been paid to the notion that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns at the heart of contemporary policing practices, this book makes a significant contribution to knowledge about the policing and security governance of flows. The book focuses on how the growing centrality o...

At a time when flows of both water and finances were severely curtailed, this article explores the public and private adaptation actions which played out during Cape Town's drought which produced a 'shock within a shock' on the municipality's budget (2016-2018), this article provides a detailed and embedded account of the severity, urgency and comp...

This article situates contemporary developments in policing in the context of an emerging cross-disciplinary focus on ‘resilience’. We argue that an inchoate reimagining of how police, as security professionals, are engaging, and might engage, in the governance of safety with communities in response to emerging ‘harmscapes’ might be, and should be,...

This paper situates contemporary developments in policing in the context of an emerging cross-disciplinary focus on 'resilience'. We argue that an inchoate reimagining of how police, as security professionals, are engaging, and might engage, in the governance of safety with communities in response to emerging 'harmscapes' might be, and should be, c...

Under conditions of protracted reduction in supply and heightened uncertainty, one of the notable responses to the Cape Town drought (2016-2018), was the proliferation of 'water resilience' in public and private discourses. Resilience was employed as an explanatory concept and governing tool, signalling a professed transition in the municipality's...

Articles in this special issue “Lessons of the Anthropocene: Entanglements and Security” invite us to reflect on Anthropocene entanglements - what they have meant, might mean, and perhaps should mean, in order for us to exist securely in the new world.

The rapid pace of change, uncertainty and social contest associated with emerging regulatory spaces create challenges for public servants. In particular, their capacity to act in the public interest may be constrained as contesting interests vie for influence in nascent regulatory environs. This chapter explores these issues and the potential for r...

This article analyzes the implications of the Anthropocene for the governance of security. Drawing on environmental law, green criminology, and international relations, the article examines the development of environmental security scholarship over recent decades and shows similarities and differences in perspectives across the three disciplines. I...

Among scholars of law and crime and practitioners of public safety, there is a pervasive view that only the public police can or should protect the public interest. further, the prevailing perception is that the public police pre- dominantly governs through crime—that is, acts on harms as detrimental to the public good.We argue that govern- ing har...

A large number of anti-poaching, conservation and management measures have been implemented to protect rhinos. None of these responses has achieved tangible results in lowering unnatural rhino deaths through illegal hunting in southern Africa. The international donor community, conservation NGOs and governments have disbursed millions of dollars to...

A large number of anti-poaching, conservation and management measures have been implemented to protect rhinos. None of these responses has achieved tangible results in lowering unnatural rhino deaths through illegal hunting in southern Africa. The international donor community, conservation NGOs and governments have disbursed millions of dollars to...

Like other chapters in this volume, our focus is on the relationship between regulatory contexts and resource sectors within African economies— in our case the energy sector. We explore this relationship through the lens of policing, understood as intentional attempts to shape the flow of events through the application of regulatory frameworks— wha...

This article analyses the implications of the Anthropocene for the governance of security. Drawing on environmental law, green criminology and international relations the article analyses the development of environment and security scholarship over recent decades and shown similarities and differences in perspectives across the disciplines. It demo...

The Anthropocene signals a new age in our earth’s history, a human age, where we are revealed as a powerful force shaping planetary systems. What might criminology be in the Anthropocene? What does the Anthropocene suggest for future theory and practice of criminology? This book seeks to contribute to this research agenda by examining, contrasting...

The Anthropocene may require a fundamental rethinking of safety and security. The safety and security that earth systems have provided can no longer simply be regarded as the work of Nature, and as something that we humans must simply live with. We are now revealed as a geological force that has, and is shaping these systems. And this, to invoke Kl...

A large number of anti-poaching, conservation and management measures have been implemented to protect rhinos. None of these responses has achieved tangible results in lowering unnatural rhino deaths through illegal hunting in southern Africa. The international donor community, conservation NGOs and governments have disbursed millions of dollars to...

Articles in this special issue “Lessons of the Anthropocene: Entanglements and Security” invite us to reflect on Anthropocene entanglements - what they have meant, might mean, and perhaps should mean, in order for us to exist securely in the new world.

This paper explores the role that energy regimes, and the search for energy security, has had in shaping humans and their societies, and the effects thereof. Energy enrolments through the domestication of plants and animals and the extraction and burning of increasingly energy- rich fuels enabled humans to build ever more productive and formidable...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are...

Much has been written about the governance of crime – indeed, this is the thread that has unified criminology. Yet, property crimes and attacks against individuals – traditionally at the core of the discipline – are plummeting in many societies. Meanwhile, harms and harm management emerge outside the narrowness of criminal justice definitions. Desp...

[W]e come back to the old-and never resolved-problem of the pluralistic society: Who takes care of the Common Good? Who defines it? Who balances the separate and often competing goals and values of society's institutions? Who makes the trade-off decisions and on what basis should they be made? Medieval feudalism was replaced by the unitary sovereig...

This article seeks to identify means of strengthening social control and conflict resolution in weak and failing states. It begins by discussing the governance of public security in stronger states, and identifies three basic forms of engagement between state and non-state institutions that may contribute to the co-production of public security: co...

On the North American continent, in Europe and elsewhere, the dramatic growth in private security in the past several decades has reshaped the structure and function of modern policing. The development of private security has been facilitated by fundamental shifts in the nature of property relations. These changes have encouraged the development of...

The nodal governance perspective has done much to encourage an emerging body of empirical research, across a range of different social contexts, which has explored the shifting shape of policing and security governance, as well as an increasingly wide variety of public problems, including the environment, health and intellectual property. The ful...

Hope is widely acknowledged as a desirable state of individual being, but less attention has been paid to its potential as a collective sentiment that can be steered in various directions by governing agencies. (Shearing and Kempa 2004: 62) South Africa’s negotiated transition from autocratic rule to democratic dispensation has been widely presente...

Three of the authors (Jensen Shearing, Skauge) are in the core group of the SANCOOP project: Transition to Sustainable Energy Systems in Emerging Economies. It is a South African Focused Comparative Project, financed by the Norwegian and South African Research councils 2014-2016. The included countries are Brazil, China, India and South Africa. Thi...

During the first half of the 20th century, responsibility for enforcing environmental laws often fell to police. This chapter charts how the transboundary nature of environmental harms has contributed to and is creating shifts in environmental policing, which is broadly conceived as the governance of environmental security (Shearing, 2015). After...

During the first half of the 20th century, responsibility for enforcing environmental laws often fell to police. Some of the earliest policing activities focused on counteracting illegal and criminal activities in the area of hunting and poaching (Loo, 2006; Wijbenga et al., 2008: 323). However, since the 1970s, environmental laws expanded to regul...

A talk with Clifford Shearing about his experience in the field of Restorative Justice.

Recently the South African Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula, argued that local and municipal police should be thought of as 'co-owned' by communities. To enable the realisation of this vision Nqakula was reported to be considering 'changes to the Police Services Act and the laws governing municipal policing'. In this report the Mini...

Calls for governments and government agencies to be 'human rights compliant' have a long history, and since they were established in Britain in the nineteenth century, the 'new police' (what we now call 'public police') have been in the sights of rights activists. What is understood by the term 'policing'. Most specifically, in hte latter case, the...

Concerns over personal and communal security are as old as human societies, but as societies have changed arrangements for achieving and maintaining security have evolved accordingly. In this chapter we consider the implications of these changes for the governance of security. We begin with evolution of the institutions of security and associated l...

Limitation of access to information is a fundamental feature of social order. Evidentiary boundaries create a shifting network of backstage and frontstage regions that shape interaction (Goffman 1959). The location of such boundaries is a subject of constant negotiation and conflict (Giddens 1984, pp. 122-129). Boundaries may have a physical form o...

What I have been asked to do today is to reflect, with you, upon the nature of policing and its development. I will do so by relating two stories. The first is a story about the processes by and through which safety is actually produced. The second is an aspirational story about how safety should be produced. As with many aspirational stories, this...

Security is a vital subject of study in the twenty-first century and a central theme in many social science disciplines. This volume provides a comparative analysis of the ways in which the concept of security is theorized and studied across different disciplines. The book has two objectives: first, to explore the growing diversity of theories, par...

Recent attention in environmental management research has been focussed on investigating how farm management responds to biodiversity conservation guidance provided through voluntary market-based mechanisms. There has been, however, very little research done on linking individual behavioural change theories with these conservation initiatives and m...

Throughout history, ‘policing’ has essentially been about maintaining and enforcing ‘order’ (the way things ‘should be’) or, as it was referred to in earlier days, ‘peace’ (hence police came to be referred to as ‘peace officers’). Beginning in the 19th Century, however, the provision of ‘policing’ in what are now Commonwealth countries has undergon...