Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology

Through an examination of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, this book demonstrates the ability of cinematic fictions, and other complex narrative fictions, to contribute to meeting the climate challenge by shaping the desires of audiences.

What if there was a single feature film that showed us everything we need to know about climate catastrophe culture? What if that same film also made the philosophies of Slavoj Zizek, Mark Fisher, Francis Fukuyama, and Fredric Jameson accessible? Identifying the climate challenge as a cultural challenge, this book provides an unprecedented criminological analysis of both Children of Men and Fisher’s oeuvre from 1998 to 2022, and demonstrates the capacity of cinematic narratives to shape climate catastrophe culture. Seeking to be part of the solution to the climate challenge, it is the first criminological study to link the capacity of cinematic fictions to shape desire to solutions to the climate crisis. It is also one of the most detailed, and most rigorous criminological case study of a cinematic work to date.

Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology will be of great interest to students and scholars of green criminology, cultural criminology, narrative criminology, film theory, philosophy of film, and ecocriticism.

Rafe McGregor is Reader in Criminology at Edge Hill University. A critical theorist with research expertise in culture, political violence, and policing, he is the author of eighteen books, including: Anthropocide: An Essay in Green Cultural Criminology (2025), Recovering Police Legitimacy: A Radical Framework (2024), and Literary Theory and Criminology (2023). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of Advance HE.