“Local politics and global corporate crime in Irish crime fiction : Alan Glynn's Winterland trilogy",

Crime, Punishment and Article 3 ECHR: Puzzles and Prospects of Applying an Absolute Right in a Penal Context

Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which provides that ‘No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’, is considered to enshrine an absolute right. Yet it contains an under-explored element: inhuman and degrading punishment. While torture has been the subject of extensive academic commentary, and inhuman and degrading treatment has been examined to some extent, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading punishment has not been explored in significant depth, in spite of its considerable potential to alter the penal landscape.

This paper elucidates the key doctrinal elements of inhuman and degrading punishment ‘and treatment associated with it’, in the words of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It addresses a number of ‘puzzles’ or problems which arise in applying the absolute right enshrined in Article 3 of the ECHR to sentencing and imprisonment, clarifies ECtHR doctrine and highlights some of its key implications. Bringing a theoretically informed understanding to bear on the application of Article 3 of the ECHR in a penal context, the paper provides clarity and coherence to a complex and crucial intersection between human rights and penology.

Unwilling Executioner:Crime Fiction and the State

What gives crime fiction its distinctive shape and form? What makes it such a compelling vehicle of social and political critique? Unwilling Executioner argues that the answer lies in the emerging genre's complex and intimate relationship with the bureaucratic state and modern capitalism, and the contradictions that ensue when the state assumes control of the justice system. This study offers a dramatic new interpretation of the genre's emergence and evolution over a three hundred year period and as a genuinely transnational phenomenon.

Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction:A World of Crime

Why has crime fiction become a global genre? How do writers use crime fiction to reflect upon the changing nature of crime and policing in our contemporary world? This book argues that the globalization of crime fiction should not be celebrated uncritically. Instead, it looks at the new forms and techniques writers are using to examine the crimes and policing practices that define a rapidly changing world. In doing so, this collection of essays examines how the relationship between global crime, capitalism, and policing produces new configurations of violence in crime fiction – and asks whether the genre can find ways of analyzing and even opposing such violence as part of its necessarily limited search for justice both within and beyond the state.