Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 2016, Vol. 32(3) 196–204 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1043986216656672 ccj.sagepub.com Introduction Crime and Punishment in Asia Narayanan Ganapathy 1 and Lavanya Balachandran 1 Abstract The dominance of Western models of crime and criminal justice and the nascent emergence of “borderless” criminological insights precipitated by forces of globalization and transnationalization raises serious questions about their universal applicability to explain crime across time and space. Amidst the dearth of criminological work on Asia, this introduction to the Special Issue on “Crime and Punishment in Asia” commits itself to developing and honing the frontiers of an “Asian criminology” by drawing scholarly attention to the empirical and contextual specificities of the region. Such an effort is not directed towards demarcating “Asia” as a socially and culturally distinct geopolitical entity from the “West”. Rather, it is to critically reflect upon the alleged and actual variances between Asian and Western societies including the broader differences in social orientation – collectivism vs individualism and duty-based moral obligations vs rights-based beliefs respectively as well as documenting the heterogeneity and particularities within Asia. To that end, crime in South Asian and Southeast Asian contexts and political and economic changes which have given rise to novel “strains” of crime and newer criminal opportunities, remain under theorized. Ultimately, the advancement of an Asian criminological discourse in this special issue is not to merely acknowledge scholarly attempts that transpose current Anglo-Saxon models onto Asian empirical contexts or reject them, but transform existing theories and develop regional alternatives that are validated by and arise from particular empirical investigations into crime and criminal justice across Asia. Keywords crime, process, punishment, criminological theories, Asia 1 National University of Singapore, Singapore Corresponding Author: Narayanan Ganapathy, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, AS1 11 Arts Link, 04-22, 117570, Singapore. Email: socng@nus.edu.sg 656672CCJ XX X 10.1177/1043986216656672Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeGanapathy and Balachandran research-article 2016 at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on September 19, 2016 ccj.sagepub.com Downloaded from