About the seminar
While it is not unusual for criminologists and criminological studies to collaborate with state-based institutions, such as the police, prisons, or court services, it is less common for collaboration with military entities to be acknowledged in the same way. Several key criminological studies of military institutions that emerged throughout the 20th century illustrate military collaborations as a feature of the discipline’s history.
Produced against the backdrop of British criminology’s post-Second World War evolution, two studies of the UK Armed Forces during this period include Joseph Trenaman’s (1952) Out of Step: a Study of Young Delinquent Soldiers in Wartime; Their Offences and Their Treatment Under an Army Experiment, and John Spencer’s (1954) Crime and the Services.
Also, published in the different context of North American criminology, Lawrence Radine’s (1977) The Taming of the Troops: Social Control in the United States Army and – perhaps best known of all – Clifton D. Bryant’s (1979) Khaki Collar Crime: Deviant Behaviour in the Military Context provide accounts of the US military during and after the Vietnam War.
These four studies broadly represent the central plank of criminology’s 20th century engagement with the activities and behaviours of military personnel from within the institutional contexts of military settings.
Such collaborative efforts are often problematically termed the ‘criminological enterprise’, namely (positivist) criminological collaborations with state-based institutions said to unilaterally engage in policy focussed, ‘problem solving’ research (Cohen, 1998).
However, alongside seldom acknowledged past and present collaboration between criminology, criminologists, and military entities, the notion of the ‘criminological enterprise’ is seldom contested or offered much theoretical or conceptual consideration.
This talk endeavours to bring these hitherto unrelated features of criminology together in order to reveal and assess what is termed a ‘criminological-military enterprise’. This, it will be argued, is a discrete product of a broader academic ‘knowledge economy’ in the UK generating military-focussed research from across the social and political sciences (Catignani and Basham, 2021).
About the speaker
Dr Ross McGarry is a Reader at the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool.
His research interests are broadly situated in the field of critical military studies, working at intersections of sociology, criminology and ethnographic and visual methods. These empirical interests are critical of the damaging experience of military institutionalisation and the harmful presence of militarism within civic life and upon civilian landscapes.
Dr McGarry is visiting the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law as the evaluator at Sine Holen's midway assessment later the same day.