Postmodern criminology and its approach to crime and crime causation

Postmodern or constitutive criminology is one of the theories of critical criminology that was born in 90s and introduced a systematic description of postmodernism into the writings on criminology. Despite the skeptical versions of postmodernism that have influenced humanities and social sciences, postmodern criminology provides an affirmative approach and despite accepting the criticisms of postmodernism on modernism and in particular positivist empiricism, it does not believe in nihilism and subjectivism. This theory does not accept the one-dimensional readings of crime which pre-existed in criminology and combines different theories from various scientific disciplines and uses all flows of thought in the realm of postmodernism to provide a compressive analysis. Seeing criminology as a social fact has no place in this theory and postmodern criminologists believe that due to complexity of social engagements and personal relationships, complicated causation theories like choatic theory are needed. in postmodernism cause of crime is not predictable and linear rather is sensitive to initial conditions and unpredictable . Therefore, in this descriptive-analytic study we attempted to investigate and analyze the theoretical and intellectual dimensions of postmodern criminology on crime, both in terms of concept and causation