Susan Trevaskes

Biography

Susan Trevaskes is a socio-legal scholar specialising in the area of Chinese criminal justice studies at Griffith University. Her work aims to advance understanding of the evolving relationship between law and politics in China. Her publications include studies on the death penalty, punishment, policing serious crime, procedural justice and more recently, rule of law ideology in China. In of all of these areas of her research, she traces changes in the way that politics informs the practice of law and how the law, in turn, shapes political agendas that directly impact on the social control and management of populations across China. This work has resulted in the first monographs in English on criminal courts contemporary China (2007), policing serious crime in China (2010), and the politics of death penalty reform in China (2012). She has published papers in a number of preeminent journals including The China Journal, The British Journal of Criminology, The China Quarterly, and Modern China. Recent co-edited volumes include The Politics of Law and Stability in China (2014), Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China (2016) and Justice: the China Experience (2017). Her latest co-edited book, Law and the Party in China (2020), provides the first sustained account of the nexus between law and ideology in Xi Jinping’s China. This, and other recent work she has published on the ideology of law in China, unpacks the ideological and political logic underpinning  the workings of the legal system under Xi Jinping.