From Regulation to Crime Control: Preventive Justice in the Governance of Global Markets

Abstract This essay analyzes the “criminal turn” in economic governance, where national security priorities embed preventive justice rationales into global market, trade, investment, and technology regulation. Drawing on the frameworks of preventive justice and securitization theory, it illustrates how systems in China, the United States, and the United Kingdom employ anticipatory coercion, strict liability sanctions, definitional vagueness, and procedural opacity, discarding traditional criminal safeguards such as mens rea and proportionality. Comparative evaluation exposes converging preventive architectures across divergent constitutional models, producing chilling effects, delegated enforcement, multilateral fragmentation, and threats to economic openness. It advocates limited consequentialist reforms to reconcile security imperatives with rule‑of‑law integrity.