Karuppannan Jaishankar (K. Jaishankar) (born 15 June 1973) is an Indian criminologist. He is the founder and principal director and professor of criminology and justice sciences at the International Institute of Justice & Police Sciences (IIJPS), a non-profit academic institution and independent policy think tank in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India.
He is an adjunct faculty member of the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, Italy & University of Peace, Italy, and he teaches modules of the Master of Laws (LL.M.) in Cybercrime, Cybersecurity and International Law, and the Principal Research Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University of Malaya, and also a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Criminology at Saveetha School of Law, Saveetha University, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India.
He is the founding father of cyber criminology, an academic sub-discipline of criminology and the proponent of the "Space Transition Theory of Cyber Crimes" which holds that people behave differently online than they do in real life.Jaishankar K., (2008). Space Transition Theory of Cyber Crimes. In Schmallager, F., & Pittaro, M. (Eds.), Crimes of the Internet. (pp.283-301) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Jaishankar has received recognition in international and national academic rankings. Academic Influence ranked him 16th among its Top 25 Influential Criminologists in the World for the period 2010–2020 and ranked him 36th in the world among influential criminologists.
The AD Scientific Index ranked him eighth among 766 law and legal studies scholars in India, placing him in the top 3% of scholars in that category.
In 2026, the Scholarly Index ranked him 116th among the Top 1000 Scholars in Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies worldwide, based on its lifetime impact window, placing him in the top 2.5% of scholars in the ranking.
Jaishankar received the National Academy of Sciences, India (NASI)–SCOPUS Young Scientist Award in Social Sciences in 2012 and he was the first winner in the category of Social Sciences.
He also received the Prof. S. S. Srivastava Award for Excellence in Teaching and Research in Criminology from the Indian Society of Criminology in 2015.
Early and personal life Jaishankar was born in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu, India. In a 2024 interview published by the British Society of Criminology, he recalled growing up in Krishnagiri and being fascinated by Bengaluru from an early age.
Jaishankar has described his mother, K. Rukmani, as an important influence during his formative years and has credited her with instilling values of compassion, hard work and perseverance and described his father, K. Karuppannan, as an important source of wisdom, guidance and strength.
Jaishankar is married to Jyoti Jaishankar, whom he has described as an important source of inspiration and companionship in his personal and professional life.
He has also identified several criminologists and victimologists as mentors who influenced his academic development, including K. Chockalingam, Keith Harries, Marc Groenhuijsen, David S. Wall, Natti Ronel and Michael Pittaro.
In the same interview, Jaishankar said that, had he not pursued criminology, he might have explored law or politics because both fields offered opportunities to work on questions of justice and social change.
Education Jaishankar completed BSc biochemistry in 1994 from the PSG College of Arts and Science, affiliated with Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India. He then earned an M.A. in Criminology from the University of Madras in 1996 and a postgraduate diploma in Geographic Information Systems Management from the University of Madras in 2000.
He completed a Ph.D. in Criminology at the University of Madras in 2003. His doctoral thesis, Crimes of Communal Violence and Victimization in Coimbatore City: A Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Analysis, examined communal violence and victimization using geographic information systems. His doctoral research was supported by a University Grants Commission Junior Research Fellowship. His doctoral supervisor was Professor K. Chockalingam, an Indian Criminologist and the former Vice Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, while Professor Keith D. Harries, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Geography, University of Maryland served as an external dissertation reader and mentor.
Career Before establishing the IIJPS in 2022, he held a series of academic and administrative positions, beginning his career at Manonmaniam Sundaranar University, Tirunelveli (2002–2016), where he served as Lecturer, Senior Assistant Professor of Criminology, and Member of the Syndicate (Board of Governors). He subsequently joined Raksha Shakti University (now Rashtriya Raksha University), Ahmedabad (2016–2020), as Full Professor of Criminology, Head of the Department of Criminology, and Dean.
He has held the rank of full professor since 2016 and has more than 29 years of experience in teaching, research, postgraduate supervision, and academic administration.
He was a Commonwealth Academic Fellow during 2009–2010 at the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, School of Law, University of Leeds.
He is the founder and president of the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology (SASCV) (founded 2009) which works "to develop criminology and victimology in the South Asian region" and has organized five international conferences of SASCV as the general chair (Bengaluru, 2023, Ahmedabad, 2020, Goa, 2016, Kanyakumari, 2013, and Jaipur, 2011).
He is the founder and executive director of the Centre for Cyber Victim Counselling (CCVC) (founded 2009) which works to prevent cyber victimization and protect cyber victims.
Research and scholarship
Cyber criminology A central theme of Jaishankar's scholarship has been the study of crime and behaviour in cyberspace. In a 2018 article in the European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, criminologist Gorazd Meško described Jaishankar as the "founding father" of cyber criminology.
Jaishankar founded the International Journal of Cyber Criminology in 2007 and served as its founding editor-in-chief and publisher untill 2022. A 2017 article by Fawn T. Ngo and Jaishankar marking the journal's tenth anniversary discussed the development of scholarship on cybercrime and the journal's contribution to that literature.
In 2011, Jaishankar edited Cyber Criminology: Exploring Internet Crimes and Criminal Behavior, published by CRC Press. The collection brought together work on cybercrime, online offending, cyber victimization and the relationship between Internet technologies and criminology.
Space Transition Theory Jaishankar is the proponent of the Space Transition Theory of Cyber Crimes. He first presented the theory in 2007 at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, USA and published a fuller formulation as a chapter in Frank Schmalleger and Michael Pittaro's Crimes of the Internet in 2008.
The theory proposes that individuals may exhibit different patterns of conforming and non-conforming behaviour as they move between physical space and cyberspace. Its propositions address factors including identity flexibility, dissociative anonymity, reduced deterrence, movement between social spaces, and differences between the norms and values of physical and cyberspace.
Space Transition Theory has subsequently been discussed and applied by other researchers. In a 2016 review article in Victims & Offenders, Loretta J. Stalans and Mary A. Finn noted Jaishankar's argument that cybercrime may have distinctive causes from crime in physical space and identified Space Transition Theory as one of the theoretical approaches developed specifically for cybercrime.
A 2026 systematic review by Suleman Lazarus and Yushawu Abubakari identified 19 empirical studies examining applications, testing and criticism of the theory in peer-reviewed research published between 2007 and 2025. The review found evidence supporting the relevance of several elements of the theory while also reporting uneven explanatory reach, including limits in its treatment of cultural meaning-making, structural inequality and platform-specific architectures.
Subsequent research has applied Space Transition Theory to different forms of cyber-enabled crime. In 2026, Verma, Gujarathi, and Lazarus applied STT as the primary theoretical framework in a qualitative study of 35 media-reported romance fraud cases in India, examining how digitally initiated interactions transitioned into offline encounters and how opportunities for offending and victimization changed across online and physical environments.
In July 2026, Jaishankar contributed an entry on Space Transition Theory to the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cyberpsychology.
Cyber victimology Jaishankar has also worked on victimization in cyberspace. He is the founder of cyber victimology, a field of victimological research concerned with forms of online victimization, their consequences, and social and institutional responses.
In the 2024 British Society of Criminology interview, Jaishankar said that he initiated cyber victimology as a distinct area of scholarship in 2015. His chapter on 'cyber victimology' was published by Springer in 2020 in a Festschrift for victimologist Marc Groenhuijsen.
In June 2026, Oxford University Press published Jaishankar's reference article "Cyber Victimization" in Oxford Bibliographies in Criminology. The article discusses the distinctive characteristics of victimization in cyberspace and the ways in which digital technologies can facilitate victimization across geographic boundaries.
South Asian criminology Jaishankar has also published and edited work on criminology in South Asia. In 2009, he founded the South Asian Society of Criminology and Victimology (SASCV), an academic organisation focused on criminology and victimology in the region.
He edited the Routledge Handbook of South Asian Criminology, published by Routledge in 2020. Routledge describes the book as the first handbook to focus specifically on crime, criminal justice and victimization in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Academic, professional, policy and public engagement From 2007 to 2022, Jaishankar was the founder, publisher and editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Cyber Criminology and the International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences. In 2025, he founded the International Journal of Justice & Police Sciences, where he serves as publisher and editor-in-chief.
In 2006, Jaishankar was a co-winner of a competitive International Opportunities Fund grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), together with lead winner Professor Shaheen Shariff of McGill University, Canada, for the project, Cyber-bullying: A project to address the policy vacuum and develop international guidelines for schools. The project received a C$143,471 grant and examined cyberbullying and the development of international policy guidelines for schools.
In 2007–2008, he served as a member of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime core group of experts on identity-related crime and participated in its first meeting at Courmayeur, Italy, in November 2007.