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Exploring Future Crimes: Technologies, Digitalization, and Malleable Criminality (AJOC Special Issue)

Call for Papers

This special issue invites papers that provide a cutting-edge understanding of the malleable nature of future crimes within and beyond Asian contexts. Future crimes refer not only to offenses that may emerge in the future but also to current criminalities that will continue to evolve. Introducing the concept of future crimes is not a hype-driven terminological exercise. Rather, it highlights an epistemological potential that is increasingly valuable given the immeasurable boundaries of technological evolution and societal digitalization in the global realm.

Over recent centuries, groundbreaking technologies—such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and brain-machine interfaces—have fundamentally reshaped human civilization in various dimensions. Among these, criminality facilitated by technology and digitalization stands out as an area requiring substantial and sustainable exploration (Grabosky, 2001; Johnson, 2024). On the one hand, technological advancements have led to new types of criminality that existing frameworks struggle to capture, such as AI-enabled crimes (Caldwell et al., 2022) and metacrimes (Zhou et al., 2024). On the other hand, as society becomes increasingly digitalized, traditional forms of criminalities are also evolving, resulting in ongoing “tactical crime displacement” , such as the evolution of modus operandi in cyber fraud and money laundering (Chang et al., 2023; Manning et al., 2025; Tiwari et al., 2024).

To address these dynamic challenges, an emerging body of studies started to examine “future crimes” to reveal the malleable nature of these criminalities facilitated by evolving technologies and digitalized society (e.g., Akartuna et al., 2024; Johnson, 2024; Manning et al., 2025; Trozze et al., 2022; Zhou et al., 2024). However, the conceptual, theoretical, and practical understanding of future crimes still requires substantial and context-specific examination to provide visionary insights into digital security and future resilience (Dupont, 2019; Lee & Kim, 2023). In this special issue, we invite papers focusing on two primary areas: 1) discovered future crimes that were not explicitly recognized in the past or 2) evolutionary future crimes that have existed but are subject to continuous evolution.

We are particularly interested in conceptual, theoretical, and empirical research that explores future crimes in the global context, including but not limited to:

  1. The interplays between new technologies, digitalization, and future crimes;
  2. The conceptualization, typology, and terminology of future crimes;
  3. Theoretical adaptability in understanding future crimes;
  4. Trends in discovered and evolutionary future crimes;
  5. Gender-based future crimes;
  6. Prevention, policing, and correction of future crimes;
  7. Legislation, regulation, and policy-making on future crimes;
  8. Methodological innovations in understanding future crimes.

Guest Eitors

  • You Zhou, PhD Scholar, School of Social Sciences, Monash University, AU
  • Milind Tiwari, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University, AU
  • Claire Seungeun Lee, Ph.D., Associate Professor, School of Criminology and Justice Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA
  • Benoît Dupont, Ph.D., Professor, School of Criminology, Université de Montréal, Canada

Proposed Timeline

  1. The deadline for submission of the abstract: 31 March 2025;
  2. Responses to the abstracts: 15 April 2025;
  3. The deadline for submission of full manuscripts: 15 August 2025;
  4. Expected publication: November 2025;
  5. All submissions will undergo a peer review.
    Abstracts will be submitted electronically to: you.zhou@monash.edu

Abstract Structure

The structured abstract will be 500 words maximum and include the following details:

  1. Author name(s) and affiliations
  2. Title and keywords
  3. Structured abstracts should include a brief description of the topic, methods, preliminary results/expected findings, research contributions, and/or policy implications.

Full Manuscript

All full manuscripts should be submitted online to the Asian Journal of Criminology via Editorial  Manager: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ajoc. To ensure your paper is considered for this special issue,  reply “yes” when asked during submission whether it is intended for a special issue, and select the  relevant title from the drop-down menu. All submitted manuscripts must be fully compliant with the  journal’s submission guidelines: https://link.springer.com/journal/11417/submission-guidelines.  Manuscripts submitted after 15 August 2025 will not be considered. The special issue is expected to be  published in a journal issue circa November of 2025.

For more information about this special issue, please visit:
https://link.springer.com/journal/11417/updates/27737736

References

Akartuna, E. A., Johnson, S. D., & Thornton, A. (2024). A Holistic Network Analysis of the Money Laundering Threat Landscape: Assessing Criminal Typologies, Resilience and Implications for Disruption. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 1-42.
Caldwell, M., Andrews, J. T., Tanay, T., & Griffin, L. D. (2020). AI-enabled future crime. Crime Science, 9(1), 1-13. Chang, L. Y. C., Zhou, Y., & Phan, D. H. (2023). Virtual kidnapping: Online scams with ‘Asian characteristics’ during the pandemic. In R. G. Smith, R. Sarre, L. Y. C. Chang, & L. Y. C. Lau (Eds.), Cybercrime in the pandemic digital age and beyond (pp. 109–130). Springer.
Dupont, B. (2019). The cyber-resilience of financial institutions: significance and applicability. Journal of Cybersecurity, 5(1), 1-17. Grabosky, P. N. (2001). Virtual criminality: Old wine in new bottles? Social and Legal Studies, 10(2), 243–249.
Johnson, S. D. (2024). Identifying and preventing future forms of crimes using situational crime prevention. Security Journal, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-024-00441-5.
Lee, C. S., & Kim, D. (2023). Pathways to cybersecurity awareness and protection behaviors in South Korea. Journal of Computer Information Systems, 63(1), 94-106.
Manning, M., Akartuna, E. A., & Johnson, S. (2025). Opportunities to future crime: Scoping the future of money laundering and terrorist financing through cryptoassets. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 210, 123894.
Tiwari, M., Ferrill, J., & Allan, D. M. (2024). Trade-based money laundering: a systematic literature review. Journal of Accounting Literature. Ahead-of-print. Doi: 10.1108/JAL-11-2022-0111.
Trozze, A., Kamps, J., Akartuna, E. A., Hetzel, F. J., Kleinberg, B., Davies, T., & Johnson, S. D. (2022). Cryptocurrencies and future financial crime. Crime Science, 11, 1-35.
Zhou, Y., Tiwari, M., Bernot, A., & Lin, K. (2024). Metacrime and cybercrime: Exploring the convergence and divergence in digital criminality. Asian Journal of Criminology, 19(3), 419-439.