This article explores the salience of the concept of violent exchange to contribute towards a global criminology of relationality. Coined in the Global South, the concept explores how we can understand criminal justice encounters across the Global South and North as relational exchanges, what is being exchanged by whom and what role potential and actual violence play in the exchanges. Through a disjunctive comparative effort, where cases are used to elicit new questions at global level, the article compares incidents of violent exchange in the Philippines, Kenya, the USA and Denmark. It concludes that we can in fact think of criminal justice practices relationally and that the comparison elicits new questions pointing towards future research agendas.
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