Journal of Contemporary Crime, Harm, and Ethics

Book review: Briggs, D., Telford, L., Lloyd, A., Ellis, A. and Kotzé, J. (2021). Lockdown: Social Harm in the Covid-19 Era. Palgrave Macmillan.

Emily Setty — 2022-09-14

Is the neoliberal era coming to an end?

Simon Winlow — 2022-09-14

It is easy to become enthralled by foreground events, especially when they are as devastating as the Covid-19 pandemic. However, to really get a sense of what is going on, one must also look at the background. Beyond the pandemic’s spectacular foreground, we have seen a range of changes that might encourage the more optimistic among us to form the view that the neoliberal era is approaching its terminus. Barely comprehensible sums of money have been created to cushion the pandemic’s heavy blows, and a range of policy initiatives have emerged that are obviously antagonistic to the main shibboleths of neoliberalism. However, the language of neoliberalism remains. The myths that assisted neoliberalism to maintain its global supremacy for over forty years – especially those that misrepresent our money system – continue to be presented to the general public as if they were unchallengeable truths. So, what is really going on? Looking principally at events in Britain, this article attempts to shed some light on the evolution of global capitalism.

Tick, Tock, Boom!

Anthony Ellis — 2022-09-14

This article offers a critical forecast on violent crime as the UK begins to emerge from the global Covid-19 pandemic. The article is structured into three thematic sections that separately address three key issues related to the issue of violence contemporarily. Firstly, the article places in context the rise in serious forms of violent crime across England and Wales that occurred in the years preceding the arrival of Covid-19. Secondly, it considers, briefly, the pandemic’s impact upon violence, specifically the effect of lockdown upon patterns of violence. Thirdly, and finally, the article provides a critical forecast, which draws together some of the points identified in the preceding two sections. This final section suggest that serious violence may become a more significant issue in the UK’s post-pandemic context of inequality, austerity legacy, the harms of lockdown to vulnerable groups, and the cost-of-living crisis.

Passport to neoliberal normality? A critical exploration of COVID-19 vaccine passports.

Luke Telford — 2022-09-14

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic governments across the world including in France, Canada, Lithuania, Austria, Italy, and Ireland imposed ‘vaccine passports’ on the premise that they would curtail transmission of the virus, reduce COVID-19 related mortalities, and enable society to return to neoliberal normality. However, vaccine passports raise several important and troubling issues that have not been given sufficient attention within the social sciences. Therefore, this article offers a critique of vaccine passports. It is structured into three key themes: (a) scientifically and ethically problematic, (b) the death of the social and the ‘Other’, and (c) digital surveillance and freedom. The article begins by exploring how vaccine passports make little scientific sense and further entrench some unvaccinated peoples’ sense of political and medical mistrust. It then discusses how they amplify social divisions, creating the unvaccinated Other in society and intensifying the neoliberal shift towards a post-social, contactless world. The paper closes with an outline of how vaccine passports were cast as enabling a return to neoliberal normality and freedom, hinging upon an assumption of harmlessness while cementing the negative ideology of capitalist realism.

Hope, dystopian futures and Covid-19 as the ‘event’ that changed the world (forever?)

Daniel Briggs — 2022-09-14

Film and series writers have for some time have projected imaginative yet sometimes quite real possible end-of-the-world scenarios. The evolution of blockbuster science-fiction films from the mid-20th century onwards initially generated scenarios related to threats to humanity from alien invasions. Then, towards the 1990s and at the turn of the 21st century, there emerged climate-related catastrophes, impending meteorite or asteroid collisions, bio-attacks as well as the general collapse of politics, law and order and revision of social life on earth into some perpetual violent and hostile land. In the same vein, other possible futuristic apocalypses have also been depicted through the inception of ‘unknown’ and ‘fatal’ viruses which all but wipe out humanity save one brave hero or heroine who takes it upon themselves to rescue the future from the past: somehow, however, averting the crisis and the world is saved. In many of these films, the devastation left on the planet inevitably resets humanity and in the aftermath the dawn of a new future is left in the responsible hands of a few survivors. All the while, only ‘hope’ somehow got them through. Using such portrayals of end-of-world scenarios and dystopian future films and series as possible avenues for our potential trajectory and different conceptions of ‘hope’, this paper speculates about our future in a post-Covid world using aspects of Žižek’s critical discussions on hope and hopelessness (2018) and Tom Moylan’s (2020) concept of the ‘dystopian structure of feeling’.

Old Ghosts/New Regrets

Dimitar Panchev — 2022-09-14

With the onset of the pandemic, the precarious position of Roma communities in Bulgaria, particularly young people and their future prospects, seem bleaker than ever before, reaching new heights in terms of their insecurity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, conducted prior to and post several lockdowns during the pandemic (2020-2021), this paper will place forward the argument that the crisis we are currently witnessing, the unprecedented levels of multi-faceted social marginalization and exclusion are intensified by ‘old ghosts’ that have haunted social policy for decades and the withdrawal of the state during the lockdowns will most certainly have a devastating impact – ‘new regrets’, one’s which cannot be overcome by simply providing access to the consumer market economy, the mantra on which the pathways towards revitalization are premised.

Editorial

Daniel Briggs — 2022-09-14

This editorial introduces readers to the most recent issue of JCCHE.

The Enigma of Social Harm: The Problem of Liberalism

Simon Winlow — 2022-09-14