'States of Transition: Convergences and diversity in international youth justice'

Abstract

It is no longer necessary to make the case for a comparative approach to understanding systems of youth and juvenile justice. It is increasingly assumed that developments in any single nation state cannot be fully explored without reference to sub-national, regional and local diversity as well as acknowledging the impact of international and global forces. The advantage of an international focus (even though this volume is restricted to 12 ‘significant’ cases in Western societies only) is that it encourages debate of the structural, cultural and political constraints and dynamics within which juvenile justice was constructed in developed capitalist countries during much of the 20th century and which have then been challenged, and in some cases overturned, since the 1980s. Comparative analysis makes it possible to begin to unravel the relative import of internal, national dynamics and external, international contexts and constraints. But equally it must be recognised that, as a result of competing internal and external pressures, such systems are continually in transition and flux. Whatever future trajectories appear likely on the basis of a reading in the first decade of the 21st century may not hold for a decade in the future. As a result, rather than simply seeking apparent similarities and differences, this volume recognises the increasing complexity of the 13