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The Architecture of Violence: Towards a Theory of Infrastructural Harm book cover

1st Edition

The Architecture of Violence Towards a Theory of Infrastructural Harm

By Simon Hallsworth Copyright 2027
306 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

306 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book offers a new way of understanding harm in modern society. Rather than treating violence as the result of breakdown or failure, it argues that many forms of harm are built into the very systems designed to organise and protect social life. Laws, institutions, technologies, and policies can produce damage not by malfunctioning but by working exactly as intended. Drawing on examples... Read more

1. Introduction 2. From Euclidean to Post-Euclidean Criminology Section 1. Hard Infrastructure: Machines and their Assemblage 3. The Perversity of the Machines 4. Interzone 5. The Carnival of Power Section 2. Soft Infrastructure: The Libedinal Economy of Destructive Machines 6. Towards a Cultural Criminology of the State 7. The State and its Fantasy Life 8. Sovereign Pleasure Regimes 9. Conclusion: After Euclid: Toward a Criminology of Infrastructural Harm  

Biography

Simon Hallsworth is Emeritus Professor at University of Suffolk, an established voice in critical criminology. His work spans the study of urban violence, community safety, green criminology, penal and state theory. He is the author of Street Crime (2005) and The Gang and Beyond: Interpreting Violent Street Worlds (2013).

With The Architecture of Violence, Simon Hallsworth offers criminology not just a paradigm shift, but something closer to a paradigm shove – a shove past criminology’s clean Euclidian categories, and deep into the entangled dynamics of a post-Euclidian criminology. By way of this new paradigm, he reveals a disturbing world of endemic organizational harm and encoded adulteration, a world where official violence emerges from perverse desires and lurid machines. All in all, a book of intellectual daring and dark revelation.

Jeff Ferrell, author of Drift: Illicit Mobility and Uncertain Knowledge

Ambitious, far-sighted and beautifully written, this might just be the book that drags criminology out of the mire and refocuses its attention on what truly ails the world.

Simon Winlow, Professor, Northumbria University

Simon Hallsworth’s espousal of what he terms a ‘criminology noir’ has great potential to help us both re-think and re-enliven radical debate on violence and the contemporary cultures of control into the 21st century.  The conceptual originality, scope and breadth of this book should guarantee it a global significance for years to come.  

Gordon Hughes, author of Crime, Violence and Modernity, and Professor Emeritus in Criminology, Cardiff University, UK

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