CALL FOR PAPERS Nº 35 - IURIS DICTIO JOURNAL

2024-06-28

Contemporary Criminality: interdisciplinary reflections on criminology, focused on human rights and criminal policy

 The Law Review Iuris Dictio invites researchers and specialists in Criminology, Social Sciences, Criminal Law, Forensic Sciences, Human Rights and related areas to submit their articles for consideration as part of Dossier No. 35 of the review, which will be published in June 2025 and will broach current challenges in criminology with an interdisciplinary focus on human rights.

The first decades of the 21st century have provided a challenging scenario for criminological science and criminal policy. On one hand, new forms of criminality have appeared through the use of new technologies, and on the other, the upsurge and transformation of old forms of violence, as occurred with gender-based crimes; the multiple forms of interference of organized crime in countries; the recruitment by criminal gangs of minors at increasingly younger ages; the visibility of large networks of white-collar crime in all its forms; hate crimes and the dizzying rise in femicides, are some of the phenomena that citizens are perplexed to confront.  

At the same time, it is evident that the efforts of the State to reduce these phenomena have developed in a sectoral and almost exclusively reactive manner. However, these actions have primarily been grounded in classical and neoclassical criminological canon, which link the increase in crime with the severity of punishment as a method of intimidation or, in the best of cases, the dissuasive effect associated with the effectiveness of the criminal system. By doing so, both cases have systematically opted for a symbolic confrontation of good and evil and the idea that prevention is synonymous with criminal dissuasion, which has lead to a cycle of unending expansion of criminal law under a punitive, populist discourse that unfortunately has not resulted in a lowering of crime rates.

In this scenario, the integration of interdisciplinary perspectives is necessary in order to deeply understand these phenomena, combining theoretical and empirical approaches to create complex and efficient intervention strategies, in accordance with the respect for human rights. These spaces of intervention include the criminal system but do not circumscribe it, amplifying the perspective of proposals that act within the field of public policy, which is part of criminal policy. In effect, criminology acts as a privileged space of convergence between diverse fields of knowledge, such as sociology, anthropology, victimology, criminal sciences, human rights, criminal law, forensic sciences, psychology, among others, coming together with the intent of creating criminal policy proposals actually capable of making the desired social impact.

Having lain out this background, Dossier No. 35 of the review Iuris Dictio, coordinated by professor Vivian Monteiro, seeks to contribute reflections on distinct kinds of criminality from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on respecting human rights, as a contribution from criminological philosophy to the necessary interventions in criminal policy.

Accordingly, the following are some of the suggested topics for the Dossier:

  • Studies on diverse kinds of criminality: juvenile delinquency, white-collar crime, organized crime, complex criminality, cyber crime, human trafficking, among others.
  • Criminal policy and complex crime prevention - effective interventions of crime prevention at community, national or international levels that combine multi-level prevention strategies.
  • Victimology, victim rights and new possibilities for criminal justice.
  • Emergent models of conflict resolution: peacekeeping justice, therapeutic justice, restorative justice.
  • Critical criminology and the criminal system.
  • Feminist criminology. Gender based violence: intersectionality, masculinities, contexts, organized crime, violence prevention and access to justice. Current debates on sexual crimes and consent. Women and crime.
  • Social rehabilitation and incarceration.
  • Green criminology.
  • Expert investigations with a focus on human rights.

Likewise, this call for papers is open to receive articles on diverse topics on Law for the Miscellaneous section, book reviews for the Reviews section and interviews for the Interviews section. All articles must be original and not being considered for publication elsewhere.

Articles can be in Spanish or English and must respect publication guidelines, which can be found at the following link:

https://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/iurisdictio/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

The deadline for submission is 15 December 2024. Articles must be submitted on the review’s OJS platform, after registering as a user at the following link: http://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/iurisdictio/user/register

Any further questions may be directed to:

vmonteiro@usfq.edu.ec

revistaiurisdictio@usfq.edu.ec

We appreciate your sharing this call for papers.