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Some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly are related to violence, crime and crime control issues. In what seems to be an innovative approach, the so-called ‘international community’ has seemed to reach the commonsensical agreement that, in order to enjoy sustainable development and strengthen the capabilities, well-being and freedom of the citizens of the global south, their governments must reduce violence and crime (SDG 16.1). The SDGs also seem to provide the response to tackle crime and violence in the global south. SDG 16.3 aims at ‘promoting the rule of Law at the national and international level and ensuring equal access to justice for all’. Thus, the promotion of the rule of law has commonly been understood as the strengthening of the criminal justice system and State security forces to reduce crime and impunity in the global south. Focussing on Latin America, this article will critically discuss the problematic presuppositions and implications of such a paradigm, which tends to impose, reproduce and legitimise the particular worldviews of global north countries and institutions. This approach is counterproductive, for it does not acknowledge the particularities and historical trajectories of Latin American countries, while naturalising specific global north political, economic and truth regimes.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to forward an extension of reception analysis as a way to incorporate and give insight to social media mediations and big data in a qualitative marketing perspective. We propose a research method that focuses on discursive developments in consumer debates for example on YouTube – a large-scale open-access social media platform – as opposed to the closed and tightknit communities investigated by netnography.

Online reception analysis

Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, we find that big data can enrich online reception analyses by showing new aspects of weak tie online networks and consumers meaning making.

The potential of online reception analysis is to encompass a discursive perspective on consumer interactions on large-scale open-access social media and to be able to analyze socialities that do not represent shared cultures but are more representative of transitory everyday interactions.

Our method contributes to the current focus to define levels of analysis beyond research centered on individuals and individual interactions within groups to investigate other larger socialities. Further, our method also contributes by incorporating and investigating the mediatization of interaction that social media contributes with and therefore our methods actively work with the possibilities of social media. Hence, by extending the advances made by netnography into online spaces, online reception analysis can potentially inform the current status of big data research with a sociocultural methodological perspective.

The language of resilience is increasingly used by International organizations that seek to respond to contemporary social, economic, and environmental crises. This paper focuses on the World Bank’s World Development Reports, and its uses of resilience. By deploying a quantitative critical discourse analysis, this paper shows how in the recent years resilience has gained traction within the Bank’s discourse. It further analyses the evolution of the genre, the style, and the ideational content of the Bank’s discourse related to resilience. Resilience is now depicted as something that can be built and not just observed. Furthermore, it is increasingly reified in these reports and ascribed to a whole gamut of entities. The ontological indistinction of resilience reinforces its fit with contemporary neoliberal governance.