Research project Soft regulation, serious harm?

Drawing on critical criminological scholarship, it goes beyond the legal definition of crime to include a wider range of social harms, including human rights violations, environmental degradation, and modern slavery. Rather than being dealt with in criminal law and on traditional legal arenas, these harms are often the subject of other types of control, such as voluntary frameworks, soft law and self-regulatory initiatives (Corporate Social Responsibility). This project takes an interest in this range of soft and/or private regulation, and its relationship to hard and/or coercive mechanisms, with a focus on public-private (state-corporate) relationships. By studying e.g., how politicians frame the regulation of corporate conduct, and how non-enforceable mechanisms operate in practice, the project aims to contribute to criminological knowledge on contemporary mechanisms of control.