The Relationism Theory of Criminal Justice – Insight for a Paradigm Shift from the East

Building a general theory of criminal justice has been a largely abandoned project in the dominant Western development of criminal justice theories. I analyze the difficulties and take insights from Eastern context to revive this important project.  Generally, there are two significant difficulties in building a general criminal justice theory. First, different from criminology theories, criminal justice produces multiple outcomes at different levels. Second, the scopes of existing theories largely originate from Western contexts and data, few including cross-cultural variation. This presentation outlines a unified theory to explain multiple criminal justice outcomes at the system, institutional, and individual levels across cultures under a paradigm shift from the current “monotonic paradigm” to a more general “comparison paradigm.” The new paradigm logically contains the existing paradigm while broadening research questions and scope of criminal justice studies. It constructs a new set of concepts and propositions, presenting an effort toward a general causal criminal justice theory

Professor Jianhong Liu

Jianhong Liu 

Jianhong Liu is a Distinguished Professor at Faculty of Law, Macau University of Science and Technology. He has authored and co-authored 226 academic publications, including 31 books and more than 100 SSCI or Scopus articles, as well as more than 50 book chapters. He has won many awards, including 2025 “Sellin & Glueck Award” of the American Society of Criminology, 2016 “Freda Adler Distinguished Scholar Award” from the International Division of the American Society of Criminology, and 2018 "G. O.W. Mueller Award for Distinguished Scholar” of the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. His co-authored book has won several awards too. Professor Liu has served in numerous leadership roles in international academic organizations. He was the Elected Founding President and Honorary President of the Asian Criminological Society (2009 - 2015); he has been the Elected President of the Scientific Commission of the International Society for Criminology (since 2014), the Elected Chairman of the General Assembly of the Asian Criminological Society (since 2016) etc. Prof Liu is the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Criminology (SSCI Q2). He has been invited to give more than 80 keynote speeches and seminars internationally over 80 keynote and plenary speeches including at European Society of Criminology, International Society of Criminology, Asian Criminological Society, and Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.