After studying at the universities of Cambridge and London he took a Ph.D. at the LSE, where he also taught the History of Political Thought. He has held research posts at the universities of Warwick and Kent, where he also taught Theories of Crime and Deviance on the LLM programme. He has been a visiting fellow at the Central European University in Budapest and at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg. He is currently programme leader for Criminology at the University of Sunderland.