Abstract Narrative criminology has emerged over the past two decades as a dynamic theoretical approach within the study of crime and deviance. In contrast to mainstream criminology, which has traditionally understood criminal action as the product of variables such as economic deprivation, personality disorder, or institutional dysfunction, narrative criminology shifts the analytical focus to the constitutive, directive, and justificatory power of stories. From this perspective, individuals do not commit crime simply because they possess a particular attribute; rather, they act within and through the narratives that lend coherence, direction, and legitimacy to their lives. The approach is a legitimate product of the broader "narrative turn" in the humanities and social sciences—an intellectual current with roots in poststructuralism and critical theories of language, which proposes that human experience is not accessed directly, but is shaped, represented, and transmitted through narrative structures. It is crucial to note that this emphasis on narrative should not be narrowly interpreted as a focus solely on the oral accounts of offenders; the approach recognizes a wide range of narrative sources, including victims' accounts, official documents, oral histories, media texts, and broader cultural narratives embedded in literature, film, and political discourse.
Despite its rapid growth over the past decade, narrative criminology continues to face pressing questions regarding its theoretical status. A distinct research gap is evident in the literature, which can be summarized along three axes. First, existing studies have largely either explicated the approach's capacities or critiqued it from external perspectives, such as those of positivist or structuralist traditions; an evaluation based on its own stated criteria—an immanent critique—is rarely undertaken. Second, theoretical discussions have paid insufficient attention to recurrent misconceptions about the approach, which inadvertently recall the very positivist foundations it promised to transcend. Third, while there is general acknowledgment of the approach's limitations, these have rarely been subjected to systematic formulation. This article addresses these gaps by asking whether narrative criminology has genuinely moved beyond the prevailing assumptions of mainstream criminology, or has merely reproduced classical concepts in new language.
The article proceeds in three interconnected analytical steps. The first reconstructs the theoretical orientation and conceptual apparatus of narrative criminology. Drawing on modern narratology, narrative is defined as the meaningful organization of events through two fundamental elements: story (the set of narrated events) and plot (the causal and meaningful relations among these events). In the criminological context, this organization foregrounds three core analytical dimensions: narrative causality, which addresses how narrative provides a meaningful context within which harmful action becomes comprehensible and justified; characterization of offender and victim, rooted in Goffman's dramaturgical approach, which involves the distribution of moral positions—who is cast as hero, victim, or villain—and is never neutral, always linked to the allocation of responsibility; and narrative identity, which explores how self-stories justify past action and set the stage for future conduct, while recognizing that offender self-narratives are often not coherent and unified, but multidimensional, fragmented, and marked by "narrative hot spots" where tensions become apparent.
The second step identifies and critiques three fundamental misconceptions that undermine the approach's critical potential. The first is its reduction to mere storytelling, which ignores the approach's analytical engagement with narrative discourse—how events are organized into meaning—rather than the raw content of the story. The second is its reduction to a research method, such as narrative interviewing, which overlooks the crucial epistemological distinction between narrative as a data-collection tool and narrative as a paradigm. The third, relatedly, is the treatment of narrative as a tool for discovering an objective, positivist "truth," rather than focusing on what Sandberg (2010) terms narrative truth, where the analytical value lies in the identity-constructing and performative functions of storytelling, even when it involves deception.
The third and most substantial step turns to the internal tensions that arise from the approach's own logic. The first and most fundamental is narrative silence, formulated on two distinct but intertwined levels. One is traumatic silence: the narrator's inability to articulate experience due to the severity of psychological harm. This is not a simple absence but an active, socially-constructed space where usual linguistic frameworks break down, posing a profound methodological paradox—narrative criminology needs narrative to understand its effects, yet narrative fails precisely where the most damaging experiences are located. This "narrative pause" at critical moments is not limited to victims; studies of violent offenders show a similar narrative breakdown when describing the moment of violence itself. The second level concerns the non-discursive: language's own incapacity to fully represent dimensions of experience—embodied habits, pre-linguistic affects, practical skills, automatic reactions—that are thoroughly real and consequential yet resist narrativization. This challenge is especially acute in two areas: violence and incarceration. The concept of "carceral habitus" (Page & Goodmann, 2020) illustrates how the embodied, habitual dimensions of prison experience cannot be fully captured through inmate interviews alone.
The second internal tension is the politics of narrative, concerning the approach's relationship with power. This operates at two complementary levels. At the pre-narrative level, unequal power relations determine whose narrative is heard and whose remains unheard—a structural silencing that raises the ethical question of whether narrative criminology should actively seek to restore voice to the marginalized. At the post-narrative level, narratives are always produced within specific "discursive orders" shaped by criminal justice institutions, media, and the academy itself, and are perpetually susceptible to appropriation by more powerful institutions. Against the danger of "narrative voyeurism"—consuming stories of suffering for academic pleasure without ethical commitment—the article argues for a reflexive narrative approach that accepts the "responsibility of witnessing": a committed presence in the face of the other's narrative, with critical empathy and constant awareness of the researcher's own position within circuits of power.
The central argument of the article is that the tension between narrative and its non-discursive remainders—traumatic silence, embodied habits, structurally imposed silences—is not an epistemological flaw, but the very condition of possibility for narrative criminology itself. If everything were reducible to narrative, the approach would risk collapsing into a tautology: "narrative constructs crime and we analyze narrative." The way out of this impasse is to acknowledge precisely those things that escape narrative. Taking these tensions seriously does not require negating the approach, but rather delimiting its claims and re-theorizing its status. Narrative criminology remains faithful to its theoretical promise only when it abandons totalizing ambitions and redefines itself as a "boundary-conscious analytical lens"—a lens whose value lies not in eliminating what lies outside narrative, but in illuminating the dynamic relationship between the narrative and those remainders that refuse to be fully narrated. This redefinition carries a practical corollary: the narrative criminological researcher must adopt a reflexive orientation, aware of their own position of power, and committed to situated, partial explanations of crime stories, with sensitivity to power as an internal logic of analysis rather than an external appendix.
Keywords: narrative criminology, narrative turn, crime stories, narrative causality, narrative silence, politics of narrative.
