A stubbornly high level of interpersonal violence in town and city centres across Britain every weekend is gradually being recognized as a key aspect of the general problem of crime. In this article we want to explore some of the important criminological outcomes of night-time leisure in a culture dominated by hedonism and the logical needs of the free-market consumer economy. Our ongoing research into the night-time economy in its broader social and economic contexts suggests that alcohol-related violence is emblematic of British society at this point in its history; a point we have conceptualized as the ‘breakdown of the pseudo-pacification process’. Since the 1980s, the altering cultural norms accompanying Britain’s enthusiastic adoption of the free-market consumer economy seem to have opened the door for specific types of interpersonal violence, the containment of which is proving very difficult for traditional-informal techniques of control and state-centred agencies alike.
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