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This chapter introduces the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and considers how criminological research, policy and practice can advance this global agenda. It critically accounts for the complex geopolitical, institutional and ideological landscapes that gave rise to this agenda and the challenges this poses for implementing the SDGs today. The chapter also raises important questions about the viability and consequentiality of global efforts to govern the nexus between crime, justice and sustainable development on account of the gravest threat to humanity, climate change. We conclude that all of these issues highlight the need for scholars and practitioners with expertise on crime and justice to approach this agenda from a critical standpoint. At the same time, we acknowledge that the SDGs remain the best global framework that we have for promoting safer and more equitable societies.

In this opening chapter, the editors review the nature of different feminist perspectives and the impact that they have had on criminology and victimology. They will pay particular attention to the influence of diverse feminist voices in both past and present and the ongoing challenges posed by the emergence of southern criminology and the recourse to law as an avenue to securing change for women living with violence.

The 1993 UN Declaration on Violence Against Women prepared the grounds for the elimination of violence against women and girls (VAWG) as a key ambition of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 with Target 5.2 specifically turning attention towards the elimination of all forms of VAWG in the public and private spheres. In this chapter, we take as given the pressing need to reduce VAWG globally. We also acknowledge that measuring VAW is fraught with difficulties, even where criminal justice system responses exist, and that these difficulties can be magnified in countries which have no domestic laws that criminalise common forms of male VAW, including domestic violence. Thus the realisation of Target 5.2 is faced with specific problems of measurement when what constitutes ‘violence against women’ is contested and when there may be no commonly agreed legal indicators between different jurisdictions to act as a proxy for goal achievement. In light of these challenges, we consider how indicators can be best mobilised to provide useful measurements of progress and success for different communities, and for different types of violence(s) against women in the light of Target 5.2.

The key purpose of this chapter is to identify some ways of enhancing feminist conceptual, empirical, and theoretical work on violence against women. Much attention is given to addressing the harms caused by new electronic forms of woman abuse, including the role of adult Internet pornography and sex robots. This chapter also emphasises the importance of revisiting some major feminist contributions from the past.

In this chapter, we first argue for a green criminological perspective on culture as well as nature, as those concepts are framed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Second, from within this green criminological perspective we discern a neocolonial hegemony in the resource extraction from developing countries that is represented by international trafficking markets in looted cultural heritage and poached wildlife. In other words, developed nations benefit from these trades while developing nations suffer, and governance regimes attempting to control these global criminal trades prioritise the rational interests and cultural norms of the more powerful market nations over the local interests and cultural histories of communities at the source of the chain of supply. Finally, our third argument is that the emerging intellectual framework of sustainable development, as represented in the UN's goals, may provide a perspective on the issue of trafficking culture and nature that can push back against the neocolonial hegemony of international criminal markets such as these.

A central focus of Sustainable Development Goal 16 is to ‘Significantly reduce all forms of violence and related death rates everywhere’. This chapter explores the magnitude of this task, focussing on the persistence – and in some cases intensification – of stark differences both within and between societies around the world in the level of suffering and death imposed by ‘ordinary’ violence in the streets and homes. These differences dramatically shape the lived experience of people on different sides of what I call the ‘violence divide’. At the extreme, they produce rates of violent death that are over 200 times higher in the most dangerous countries than in the least. These disparities are both a consequence and a cause of failures of sustainable and equitable development. They are sharpest and most consequential between parts of the global South and most of the advanced industrial societies, but they also appear in stark relief within some advanced societies, most notably the United States, reflecting broader, enduring inequities that are only weakly challenged, if at all, in the current political climate. Reducing these fundamental disparities in life and death will require moving well beyond the relatively minor criminal justice reforms and limited prevention efforts that often dominate national and international dialogue, to grapple seriously with the structural forces that breed them.

The 2006 General Assembly adoption of the United Nations (UN) Global Counter-terrorism strategy marked the first time all member states ratified a collective counter-terrorism (CT) agenda. Building on the 2000 Millennium Development Goals, the strategy incorporated Amartya Sen's capability-based approach to development. This promised human-oriented and holistic methods for countering terrorism and violent extremism, in contrast to the post-2001 ‘hard security’ context of the United States–led Global War on Terror (GWOT). Although the first pillar of the strategy emphasised human rights and social progress over isolated economic growth, poverty, violence and retrogression in conflict zones since 2006 have led to the deaths of millions. Combined with resource scarcity and environmental devastation, insurgency-related conflicts have resulted in 70 million people displaced worldwide in 2019, while the politically violent phenomena of extreme right-wing nationalism and neo-jihadism remain prevalent. Reflecting on the social and economic outcomes of the GWOT, this chapter evaluates development-related discourses and activity in UN-led initiatives to counter and prevent violent extremism and terrorism. In doing so, it accounts for the impacts of UN CT measures on contemporary patterns ‘in phenomena described in policy arenas as ‘violent extremism’ and ‘terrorism’, including ‘neo-jihadism’ and right-wing extremism, in Global North and Global South contexts.

This postscript highlights some of the most important feminist criminological contributions featured in this volume and considers their implications for future activism and social change efforts within the field of criminology – and beyond.