Keynote Speech

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Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference - December 1, 2006

Department of Criminology and Mens Rea’s Fifth Annual Postgraduate Conference

Calamity or Catalyst: Futures for Community in 21st Century Crime Prevention

by W.G. Carson, University of Melbourne

The keynote will be delivered shortly after registration and an official welcome to delegates, around 9.30am. A program will be published on this website shortly.

Abstract

The dangers inherent in deploying an unreflexive idea of  "community" as the conceptual framework for crime prevention (or any other) social policy are well known among social scientists.  What is less clear, however, is the extent to which these dangers are appreciated by those who advocate community cohesion, community capacity building, community partnerships, social capital and so on as the foundation of practical crime prevention policy.  Even less evident is the degree to which policy-makers comprehend the particular volatility and explosive potential associated with these communitarian dangers in the present geo-political and globalised context.

This address will therefore begin by briefly revisiting some of the social hazards of authoritarian communitarianism at a time when issues like inequality, racialisation and “ otherness” are becoming increasingly salient issues in the crime prevention and general social policies of many democracies.

Against this  backdrop, the paper will go on to explore how the communal and collective might be rescued or re-imagined to avoid such risks and, just possibly, to generate a revitalised and more progressive form of crime prevention, one more attuned to the realities of many contemporary societies and the broader problems of governance that they face.  In this context, the place of human obligations and rights in communal crime prevention will be discussed. 

 By venturing onto this conceptual terrain, it will be suggested, there is at least the potential to discern the glimmers of a more optimistic, if very different future for community oriented crime prevention, one that departs radically from the potentially calamitous form that it all too frequently is said to take at the present time.

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