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2 J. Hum. Just. 1 (1990-1991)

handle is hein.journals/ctlcrm2 and id is 1 raw text is: Issue Editors' Introduction

Issues in Social Order
and Social Control
Thomas O'Reilly-Fleming, University of Windsor, and
Ronald Hinch, University of Guelph
This has been a year in which the foundations of social order and social control
have been challenged on a number of fronts around the world and in Canada. The
Berlin Wall has fallen and initiated a radical transformation of the European
political order. Throughout the communist satellite states the past year has
witnessed liberation from political tyranny but not without continuing problems
with 'new' regimes. Gorbachev, struggling for his own political survival during
key periods, has been the central facilitator in the movement of the U.S.S.R.
towards democratic forms of government. Reforms, though seemingly rapid, have
been met throughout the Soviet Union with continuing pressure for quicker, more
widesweeping changes. The new detente between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.,
exemplified most recently by their joint condemnation of Iraq's invasion and
occupation of Kuwait, has invoked a new, perhaps more hopeful world order.
In South Africa, the release of Nelson Mandela after more than a quarter century
of confinement has also signalled some perceivable shift in the attitude of the
Pretoria government towards the integration of BlackAfricans into the mainstream
of society. Even the ruling National Party recently amended its constitution to
allow blacks to become members of the party. Caution, however, is advised. While
the efforts of the South African government are welcomed steps in the right
direction, they do not signal the end of apartheid, and without its removal there will
be no birth of a democratic South Africa in the foreseeable future.
CHALLENGES TO CANADIAN SOCIAL ORDER
Within Canada, challenges to the existing social order have come from a variety
of unexpected quarters in the form of direct political action and attacks upon core
institutional powers. Concurrently, new forms of scholarship and academic
interchange have produced, and are producing work which is unpacking, re-
examining, and rebuilding the concepts of social order and social control. This
enterprise means the re-examination of theory and research in criminology, as well
as the development of both historically grounded analyses and new avenues of
research. It may be, we assert, convincingly argued that this has been a time of
innovative approaches to the creation of social disorder. This has been most
graphically the case in the protest of native Canadians throughout 1990, and these
deserve further discussion.
1

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