Rethinking the ‘international law of crime’: provocations from transnational legal studies

Abstract

Neil Boister's distinction between international and transnational criminal law offers a valuable first step in delineating two fields of enquiry. Drawing on transnational legal studies, however, we show in section I how Boister engages with international criminal law in an idealised form, yet in practice this area of law faces many of the same challenges that plague transnational criminal law. In section II we challenge the stability of the category of 'transnational crime' and pluralise the international regulatory matrix beyond the use of criminal law to address the fall-outs of globalisation, expanding, in the process, the horizontal, vertical and temporal dimensions of transnational criminal law. We argue against reifying international and transnational criminal law and draw on the critical orientation of transnational legal studies manifest in its invocations of legal realism, legal pluralism and socio-legal scholarship to articulate a wide-ranging agenda for rethinking the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the 'international law of crime'.

Why lawyers internationalize and police transnationalize: disjointed criminal justice at the border of the state

“…The sometimes porous borders between international and transnational criminal justice have previously been the object of scholarly attention [15]. In this context, scholars have been critical of what they perceive as a rigid distinction that reifies international and transnational criminal justice, calling instead for conceptions that allow for empirical studies of these fields [16]. In this context, researchers have underlined that the distinction between the two has little doctrinal or jurisprudential support, and that that it has a weak basis in criminological theories or empirical evidence of how crime actually unfolds [17,18].…”

“…From the 1990s transnational police cooperation was seen both as a response to new forms of crime and as a potential challenge to the monopoly of state power ( [80], pp. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Extra-national police practices had to mediate this dilemma, while at the same time producing answers to political problems that police forces themselves helped define and put on the agenda.…”