It is a truism that the world is getting smaller. The advent of the Internet, the ease of international travel, the emergence of multinational institutions, the global awareness of genocide and other crimes against humanity, and the creation of economies that span national boundaries have all brought the people of the world into closer connection. Not surprisingly, the nature of criminal activity has also changed. New and sophisticated forms of transnational crime have emerged, challenging the capabilities of investigative and law enforcement agencies in the private and public sectors. Cybercrimes that are launched in one country with consequences in dozens of other countries raise questions about the proper locus of criminal prosecutions. Genocides and mass killings that generate a global sense of outrage underscore the need for international forums that can adjudicate these horrific criminal events. At the same time, the need for an appropriate response to these crimes has resulted in new arrangements of international cooperation among police agencies, new multilateral agreements regarding prosecution of offenders, and new efforts to prevent these crimes before they occur.

This new global reality has had important consequences for scholars, policymakers, and advocates who think about the challenges of crime and care about the pursuit of justice. As the essays in this path-breaking book highlight, the global community of criminal justice experts is engaged in a fundamental rethinking of long-standing premises that form the core theoretical and practical pillars of the disciplines of criminal justice and criminology. Indeed, this book argues for the creation of a new discipline – one that embraces the challenges of international crime and justice; one that not only bridges national and cultural boundaries that too often limit intellectual inquiry but also bridges a wide variety of academic disciplines.