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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.

This chapter examines SDG 13 which deals with efforts to combat climate change. The chapter begins by outlining the targets related to this goal, the trend towards increased heating of the planet and failures to curtail carbon emissions. This is framed using criminological concepts such as state-corporate crime and carbon criminality. The major concern of the rest of the chapter is to outline a climate action plan. As part of this, it discusses a range of initiatives currently underway intended to pressure governments to take more concerted action around climate change. These include activist interventions and climate litigation. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibilities and obligations of global community action to address the most important issue of our era.

‘Crossroads’ serves as a metaphor for networks and intersections, overlaps and trajectories, and is used throughout this book to denote how criminal transgressions and the representations of crime circulate in and out of rural spaces in the Australian countryside. This chapter provides an introduction and overview of key concepts and approaches to rural criminology informed by a ‘crossroads’ metaphor. It discusses the complexities of rurality and how these, in turn, point to significant turning points and strategic directions – not only for research and scholarship but also for understanding, communicating and responding to rural crime and deviance as it presently manifests in countries such as Australia. Along this journey, a number of issues are identified, and practical concerns signalled.

This chapter examines the theoretical contributions of Marx and Engels as a framework for analysing the historical evolution of the idea of inequality within the domestic and international legal frameworks in capitalist societies. It discusses what can be referred to as a triple inequality in the legal frameworks that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in a historical context dominated by bourgeois revolutions. The new ruling class relied on a legal-philosophical discourse to promote a drastic legal transformation: the equal treatment for all citizens under the law. This marked the beginning of a period of ‘idyllic justice’ grounded in consensual social values that gave the appearance, at least formally, of non-selectivity. Despite these promises, the emergent formal treatment under the law contrasted with the inequality of the law in practice. The continuity of the vulnerable sectors' dispossession – an inherent element of the development of capitalism – was then masked behind three modes of inequality: the denial of unequal material conditions through the imposition of an ahistorical and abstract characterisation of the law; inequality of the formal law; and inequality in the application of the law. Today, in an age of global governance, this chapter proposes that a similar process of global triple inequality is taking place through the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Reflections on possible paths to overcome this trend can be found at the end of the chapter.

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 chapter examines some key themes raised by the intersection of the urban, the rural and the penal against the backdrop of the Australian ‘rural ideal’. But the chapter also seeks to look critically at that ideal and how it relates (or does not) to the various lifeworlds and patterns of settler development that lie beyond the Australian cityscape. Attention is directed away from the singular focus on the rural/urban divide to stress the importance of North/South in understanding patterns of development and penal practices beyond the cityscape in the Australian context.