Crime that ‘Withered Away?’ Democratic Backsliding and Non-Punitive Populism

Abstract

AbstractThe article explores the relationship between democratic backsliding and governance of crime. By focusing on Serbia, which began to democratize in 2000 but started to backslide already in 2012, the article argues that governance of crime has been largely insulated from the damaging impact of the overall process of democratic decline and has been characterized by mostly moderate and inert penal tendencies. While the autocratic inclinations of the political regime have grown substantively in the last decade, crime has lost salience as a tool for political manipulation: the article proposes that this was mostly owing to an overarching political elite’s narrative that depicts Serbia as a successful and well-governed country, in which (most) crime has ‘withered away’. The article concludes by calling for research that better grasps the specificities of various forms of backsliding to understand the role of penality within them and by assessing the coherence of this finding with some of the key ideas developed within the punishment and society literature.