Introduction: Judicialization of social problems and governance of security in comparative perspectives

Abstract

This special issue is composed by six papers whose first versions were presented at the Oñati workshop Social Control, Judicialization of Social Problems and Governance of Security in Comparative Perspectives held at the IISL in July 2019. They are preceded by this introduction, where we contextualize the development of social control studies, pointing how they were originally framed as criminalization in the Global North and how the new millennium brought us an increasing number of studies discussing both criminalizations (in the plural!) and forms of judicialization and governance operating through regulatory, administrative, civil and hybrid legal regimes. By putting together articles about different contexts and jurisdictions into conversation, we hope to illuminate how legal orders (State-based or not) are mobilized to govern security and social problems, creating more nuanced categories and analytical tools to help thinking and resisting to penalization processes of any kind, anywhere, anytime.