Book Review: <i>Place, Race and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis</i> by Leanne Weber, Jarrett Blaustein, Kathryn Benier, Rebecca Wickes and Diana Johns

In March 2016, an episode of violence that occurred between groups of youth and police at a public festival in Melbourne, Australia instigated an extended law and order crisis about the criminality of African migrants in the Australian state of Victoria.In Place, Race, and Politics: The Anatomy of a Law and Order Crisis, Weber et al. track how this crisis was conditioned by racialized relations of belonging that have contributed to the marginality and insecurity of Sudanese and South Sudanese communities in the region.Framed as a monograph, the book weaves together a number of otherwise distinct research projects on the criminalization of African communities in Melbourne to document how the law and order crisis was at once precipitated and framed by the different institutional practices of local media, state politicians, and law enforcement.If the book can be understood as an experiment in form, it is a successful one insofar as the authors have crafted a cohesive explanatory narrative that conveys how the specific practices of these institutions have converged to delimit and refigure the political circumstances of local African communities.Given the scope of analysis that is facilitated by the authors' collaboration, this book should be instructive for other groups of researchers wanting to write across the results of different projects to explicate a given event or issue from multiple vantage points.The book takes a number of compositional and theoretical cues from Policing the Crisis, a multi-author study led by Stuart Hall that is now a classic in cultural studies and critical criminology (Hall et al., 1978).Policing the Crisis tracks how a racialized moral panic about muggings in the United Kingdom during the 1970s helped facilitate the transition to a neoliberal ethos of law and order (Hall et al., 1978).Echoing the conclusions of Policing the Crisis, Weber et al. demonstrate the media's formative role in advancing these kinds of political agendas; their time series analysis of media reports from 2007 to 2020 even plots a decisive peak in references to "African gangs" immediately after Victorian state elections in 2018.Yet, Weber et al. also situate their analysis in recent literatures on border criminologies to prioritize how this law and order crisis

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