Liu Jianhong has been re-elected president of the Scientific Commission of the International Society for Criminology
Liu Jianhong, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Macau (UM), who is also the associate dean (research) of the Faculty of Social Sciences, has been re-elected president of the Scientific Commission of the International Society for Criminology (ISC) during the organisation’s 19th World Congress. Prof Liu will serve a five-year term from 2019 to 2024.
Founded in 1937, the ISC is the oldest and the only international organisation in the field of criminology and criminal justice. Its Scientific Commission has been chaired by several influential scholars, who held titles such as president of the American Society of Criminology (ASC), president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS), and president of the European Society of Criminology. Held in Doha, this year’s event attracted experts and scholars from more than 60 countries and regions. During the event, Prof Liu gave a keynote speech titled ‘Global Criminology and Asian Criminology: Challenges, Strategies and Directions’, as well as a closing speech. Prof Liu pointed out that though criminology has made great progress over the years, the field has long been dominated by Western countries, while the profound historical culture and wisdom of non-Western countries, including Asian countries, have been consistently ignored, despite the fact that famous Western criminological theories and practice are often inapplicable in Asian contexts.
Prof Liu is an internationally renowned expert on criminology and criminal justice. He joined UM in 2007 and proposed the concept of the Asian criminological paradigm. Using the concept as a rallying call, he gathered around 50 criminologists from 14 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region in 2009 and they jointly established the Asian Criminological Society (ACS) at UM. By 2019, 11 annual conferences of ACS have been held in different countries. Prof Liu has published over 150 books, including 31 books, 82 articles in international academic journals (59 of which were published in journals indexed in Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) or Scopus), 39 academic books and articles, and many other academic works and reports. He was the editor-in-chief of the Asian Journal of Criminology and developed it into an SSCI-indexed journal. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Springer Book Series Asian Criminology and Criminal Justice Research. He received the Freda Adler Distinguished Scholar Award from the ASC in 2016, and the Gerhard O W Mueller Award for Distinguished Contributions to International Criminal Justice from the ACJS in 2018.