Traditionally, comparative criminology has been beset with problems and has ignored critical questions involving ideology and discourse in favor of descriptive analyses of similarities and differences. The author suggests that the concepts of globalization and governance provide new points of departure for inquiry and may be utilized to understand contemporary transformations in youth justice systems. A focus on globalization reveals the macro-level impact that these transformations in youth justice have had on the processes of policy convergence. Governance, on the other hand, offers a micro-level analysis of how youth justice is managed, contested, and resisted. Thus, these concepts are utilized to understand the global, international, national, and local shifts in youth justice. The chapter begins with an analysis of how shifts in political economy within advanced industrialized nations may have resulted in the erosion of the foundations of the welfare state and constrained the range of political strategies and policy options open to individual nations. Next, the author explores whether, and how, neoliberal conceptions of unregulated markets and international competitiveness shifted power away from nation-states and constricted social policy options and criminal justice strategies. Through an exploration of the processes of globalization and governance, two inter-related transformations emerge. The first transformation involves the convergence of criminal justice policies. The rapid convergence and homogenization of criminal justice policies has resulted in macro-socioeconomic shifts, initiatives in international law, and accelerations in policy transfer and diffusion. In order for governments to attract the necessary global capital they are compelled to adopt similar economic, social, and criminal justice policies, which is partially aided by geo-political mobility. The second transformation involves the fundamental shift in state-market relations that resulted in the move toward homogenization. The market and international capital have thus encouraged the formulation of social policies based on social inequality, deregulation, privatization, penal expansionism, and welfare residualism. In the end, this analysis suggests the worldwide decline of social democratic reformist politics and projects. References