Dr Leonidas Cheliotis

This course is available on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice Policy, MSc in International Social and Public Policy, MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Development), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Education), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (LSE and Fudan), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Migration), MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Non-Governmental Organisations) and MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Research). This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

When applying for a place on the course, all students will be required to provide a written statement explaining why they wish to take the course.

Statements will be considered by the Course Convenor and, where merited by the statement, places will be offered in the following priority order:

1. Students for whom the course appears as an ‘optional core course’ on their Programme Regulations (where students have to choose between a small number of core options).
2. Students for whom the course appears as an optional course on their Programme Regulations.
3. Other Social Policy students.
4. LSE students from Departments other than Social Policy.
 

Course selection dates can be found here.

Please note: No places will be offered on Social Policy courses UNTIL 1pm on Monday of Week 1 (AT).

For queries contact: socialpolicy.msc@lse.ac.uk

The number of students that can be accommodated on most courses is limited. If a course is over-subscribed, places will be allocated at the Convenor’s discretion, based on student statements. Therefore, students are advised to have an alternative course in mind in case they are unable to secure their first-choice course selection.

If offered a place on a Social Policy course, students should accept the place as early as possible. NB: Offers will ‘time-out’ after 48 hours and the place will be offered to another student. If a student wishes to reject an offer, they should do so as early as possible so that the place can be offered to another student.

This course runs as a half-unit option. It charts and explains in depth the multifarious relationship between technology, crime and criminal justice. Attention is paid both to ways in which technology may facilitate different forms of crime and to technology-based measures of crime control. Similarly, the course explores both the positive and negative impacts technology may have on the nature, delivery and effectiveness of criminal justice and cognate forms of state intervention. To the ends, the course brings together theoretical perspectives, concepts and empirical insights from an array of disciplinary fields (e.g., criminology, law, anthropology, history, sociology, international relations, crime science), and addresses with reference to a variety of national, transnational or international contexts such topical issues as: 

- Cyber-crime and cyber-security 

- Technology as a means and as a tool of detection of environmental crime

- Computer technology and state-corporate wrongdoing (e.g., the Horizon IT case)

- Technological innovation and changes in the nature and investigation of war crimes

- The use of Artificial Intelligence in sentencing

- The advent of facial recognition technology and its human rights implications

15 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

All teaching will be in accordance with the LSE Academic Code which specifies a minimum of two hours taught contact time per week when the course is running in the Autumn Term (AT) and/or Winter Term (WT). Social Policy courses are predominantly taught through a combination of in-person lectures and in-person classes/seminars. Further information will be provided by the Course Convenor in the first lecture of the course.

The formative assessment for this course will be an essay plan of 500 words (maximum length), on a topic chosen from a list determined by the course convenor.

The feedback provided will serve to enhance students' familiarity with key expectations for the summative assessment. Further relevant support and guidance (including additional, albeit collective, feedback) will be provided in the last week's seminar.

• Bauman, Z. (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity.
• Coker, C. (2015) Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Daems, T. (2019) Electronic Monitoring: Tagging Offenders in a Culture of Surveillance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 
• Fussey, P. and D. Murray (2025) Facial Recognition Surveillance: Policing and Human Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Clarendon.
• Harcourt, B. E. (2006) Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
• Jimenez, A. (2025) The Crimes of Digital Capitalism: Corporate Crime in an Age of Exploitation. New York: New York University Press.
• Moorhead, R. (2026) Frail Professionalism? Lawyers' Ethics after the Post Office and Other Cases. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Powell, A., G. Stratton and R. Cameron (2018) Digital Criminology: Crime and Justice in Digital Society. London: Routledge.
• Ryberg, J. and J. Roberts (2022) Sentencing and Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Yar, M. and K. F. Steinmetz (2023) Cybercrime and Society, 4th edition. London: Sage. 

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period.

The summative assessment for the course consists of one written assignment. In particular, the summative assignment will be an in-person essay-based exam, of 3 hours in duration, which will amount to 100% of the final grade. The summative assignment will not have a word limit, and will be on a topic chosen from a list determined by the course convenor. Students will be instructed to make use of both theoretical and empirical/applied literature, from a variety of disciplinary and applied perspectives, and with reference to different cases from around the world, extending beyond the Anglophone canon. To this end, students will be expected to produce a broad and systematic review of pertinent research, assessing the synthesising scholarly and other materials with a view to identifying patterns and gaps in the literature and offering persuasive arguments.