Paper short abstract:

Asking conceptual questions emerging in the global south, this presentation explores how and to what extent we may speak of exchange relations in northern criminal justice; what role violence or threat plays in and what resources are exchanged inside the criminal justice system.

Paper long abstract:

In this presentation I want to explore how and to what extent violent exchange relations are critical to criminal justice processes across the global north and south. I understand violent exchange as the use or threat of violence in order to force people into situations in which they need to exchange resources. While this is often spoken of as extortion, that is seldom just about eliciting resources through force. Often, it involves the production of spaces and temporalities of exchange. Having explored such violent exchange relations in the global south (South Africa, Bangladesh, Kenya and the Philippines) for several years, a number of questions and theoretical propositions have emerged. In this presentation, I will attempt to apply the conceptual lens to empirical material from the US and Denmark. In the global north, criminal justice is often perceived to be rule-based, that is non-arbitrary. However, it seems clear that informality and exchange relations often find their way into the system. Hence, the paper asks about how and to what extent we may speak of exchange relations in northern criminal justice; what role violence or threat play in criminal justice and what resources are exchanged inside the criminal justice system.