Comparing the governance of safety in Europe

Abstract

The concept of governance alerts us to the exercise of political authority beyond the nation state. In criminological thought governance has been associated with the preventive turn in crime control strategies in Europe that acknowledge the limits of criminal justice, invoke the direct participation of other statutory as well as commercial and voluntary sector actors and, in so doing, generate new objects and places of control signified by notions of ‘safety’ and ‘security’. The corollary of this preventive turn is a geohistorical approach to comparative criminology that is capable of recognizing the diverse contexts that constitute new governable places and objects.