Asia is both the largest continent geographically and the most populated with over 4.5 billion people (60 per cent of the world’s population), dominated by the economies and populations of both China and India. The average rural population of the 48 Asian countries is 38.2 per cent, although this varies enormously: from the city-state of Singapore with no rural population, to Sri Lanka with 81 per cent of residents residing in rural locations. There is, indeed, enormous diversity across the countries which constitute Asia, as well as diversity across regions within a country such as China – socially, economically, politically, religiously, culturally and geographically.

With Asia’s unique dimensions of size and diversity, it is unsurprising that there are no single texts which assess rural crime and victimization across the continent as a whole. There are, though, locational specific studies which address a variety of topics such as the spatial distribution of rural crime mapping, child labour, green crime and violence against women in rural India; juvenile crime in rural Vietnam; lethal violence in rural Cambodia; juvenile delinquency, gangs, violence against women, women trafficking, law enforcement, drugs, corruption and land use expropriation in rural China; violence against women in rural Sri Lanka; women trafficking and child abuse in rural Thailand; drugs in Golden Triangle areas; and so on.

Many of the empirical studies accessible with a Google Scholar search are rural-urban comparative works and mostly all in English, owing to a large extent to the conventions of academic publishing. Another disconnect exists between China and the outside world because of the technical inaccessibility of Google in China. A key issue, then, is the need to develop the capacity for further Asian theoretical and empirical studies specifically on rural criminological issues – across regions, across countries or offering a holistic Asian continent approach. Donnermeyer’s edited International Handbook of Rural Criminology (2016) has only three of its 42 chapters with a focus on Asia: the unevenness of this geographic representation is a regret he expresses in the introduction to the volume.

Though the discipline of rural criminology is thriving in some parts of the world, there are many criminal justice issues worthy of greater exploration in a rural Asian context.