Violent exchange

This article explores the salience of the concept of violent exchange to contributetowards a global criminology of relationality. Coined in the Global South, the conceptexplores how we can understand criminal justice encounters across the Global Southand North as relational exchanges, what is being exchanged by whom and what rolepotential and actual violence play in the exchanges. Through a disjunctive comparativeeffort, where cases are used to elicit new questions at global level, the articlecompares incidents of violent exchange in the Philippines, Kenya, the USA andDenmark. It concludes that we can in fact think of criminal justice practices relationallyand that the comparison elicits new questions pointing towards future research agendas.