southern criminology essay

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A critique of ‘southern criminology’, political economy of neo-colonialism and the embedding of inequality and violence on a global scale, acknowledgements.

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Mapping the Pains of Neo-Colonialism: A Critical Elaboration of Southern Criminology

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Pablo Ciocchini, Joe Greener, Mapping the Pains of Neo-Colonialism: A Critical Elaboration of Southern Criminology, The British Journal of Criminology , Volume 61, Issue 6, November 2021, Pages 1612–1629, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azab041

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Recent appeals to decolonize criminology argue for a radical reorientation of the subject towards Global South relevant research agendas, theories and scholars. This paper begins by problematizing the current theoretical tendencies in Southern criminology’s view of coloniality and the vision for decolonization. First, Southern criminology has not directly engaged in investigating ‘empire’ in its current form; second, decolonization is viewed as primarily epistemological (transforming systems of knowledge production is seen as the central mode for decolonization); and, third, there is a tendency to reify Southern institutional responses to crime as preferable to Northern crime control. Launching from this critique, we argue that a successful Southern criminology should take seriously the continuing importance of structures of neo-colonialization: the Global system of accumulation founded on various matrixes of inequality, facilitating dispossession, appropriation and exploitation. We develop three criminological analyses of contemporary neo-colonization in Global South contexts: state-corporate ‘regimes of permission’, political economies of gender violence and racialization through criminalization regimes.

A short analysis of current Global economic conditions reveals an inescapable reality of stark inequality, systemic environmental destruction and geographically specific forms of injustice and violence. As ever, the Global South bears the brunt of the most intense forms of socio-economic problems. Deforestation, for instance, has occurred in 1 million km 2 of the Amazon since 1978 ( Butler 2020 ) and, in Borneo, 60,000 km 2 of old-growth forest was removed between 2000 and 2017 ( Fraser 2019 ). Violence against women remains endemic in many economically ‘peripheral’ regions. At least 494 women in the Mexican city of Juarez were tortured, raped and assassinated between 1993 and 2007 ( Monarrez Fragoso 2009 ). In Brazil, violence against poor and Afro-Brazilian populations, sometimes involving police and other state agencies, has produced the disappearance of 786,071 between 2007 and 2017 ( Calmon 2019 ). Since 2016, the Philippine state-proclaimed war on drugs has resulted in the killing of almost 20,000 people ( Ciocchini 2019 ). Forms of labour exploitation not typical in the West since the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution remain in Bangladeshi sweatshops and many export processing zones (EPZs). There are thought to be hundreds of thousands of fishers working in unfree labour conditions across East Asia ( Jones et al. 2019 ). Plundering at times has assumed a more subtle form of financial extraction through tax evasion, offshoring and illicit flows of money out of the Global South. More than US$ 1 billion leaves developing world countries through illicit flows every year, with much of the money ending in tax-free spaces ( Kar and Spanjers 2015 ). Jason Hickel (2017 : 51) convincingly argued for a realistic poverty measure of US$5 a day (as opposed to the World Bank’s unjust $1.90), puts global poverty estimates at 4.3 billion and suggestive of rising poverty in recent years. Ruthless poverty, extreme forms of systemic or state-led violence on top of an emerging environmental crisis are all defining features of existence in many Global South regions. Consequently, there is a clear case for casting the critical criminological eye towards Global South countries to document and especially explain inequalities in harm and violence.

This intellectual endeavour has been suggested within the ‘Southern criminology’ project which calls for decolonizing the study of criminality ( Carrington et al. 2016 ; Travers 2017 ; Carrington et al. 2018 ; 2019 ; Moosavi 2018 ). Southern criminology’s stated intention is to transform the theories, concepts and methodologies of criminological enquiry, elevating Southern ‘voices’ and fostering critical interrogation of Global South social problems. Southern criminology offers the opportunity to democratize criminology, shedding light on Global inequities by challenging current practices of knowledge construction. Carrington et al. state their purpose is to ‘de-colonize and democratize the toolbox of available criminological concepts, theories and methods’ (2016: 3). The call for a Southern criminology has sparked a timely debate on the absence of analysis of colonial processes in criminological inquiry and the need to explore Global South crime-related social dynamics.

The stated political aspirations of Southern criminology are undoubtedly commendable but this paper nonetheless challenges current tendencies in the endeavour. It is true that the current project has not definitively demarcated its remit, but rather has pointed to the need for greater sensitivity towards Global South issues largely through a suggested revolution in epistemological practices. However, we argue ‘Southernizing’ analysis requires a decisive and critical focus on the tangible structures of neo-colonialization, transcending the focus on epistemology. The harms highlighted in the opening paragraph, we argue, need to be considered through a critical interrogation of the structuring of the global social order. This paper suggests one way forward by advancing a conceptual apparatus around neo-coloniality pointing towards a different direction for the Southern criminology project.

We begin with a detailed critique of Southern criminology’s theoretical orientations which restrict critical engagement with contemporary structures of neo-colonialism. Southern criminology does not tackle ‘head-on’ global hierarchical market relations and its connection to criminalization and brutality as played out in specific contexts. Currently, the Southern criminology agenda is debatably more concerned with the potential for decolonization through epistemological transformation and whether crime control solutions in parts of the Global South may be more humane than those of the North. This is consistent with a trend in post-colonial and globalization studies since the 1980s onwards which exclude the categories of ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’ from debate ( Callinicos 2007 : 3). The second part of this paper fleshes out a conception of neo-colonialism for a Southern criminological project in relation to some existing critical criminological literature. We develop three criminological dissections of neo-colonialization: the social damage of capitalist expansion through state-corporate ‘regimes of permission’ ( Whyte 2014 ), political-economic analyses of gendered violence and the role of criminal justice institutions in supporting racialized oppression in the Global South. Together, these three developments show that staying within the current penchants of the Southern criminology project could potentially lead us to fail to foreground the brutality of globalization’s many manifestations.

The recent interest in Southern criminology reflects the disciplinary aspiration to extend the criminological eye to the Global South. The current project claims that developing novel Southern-orientated theories, conceptual apparatuses and methodologies will lead to radical transformation ( Carrington et al. 2016 ; Carrington and Hogg 2017 ; Travers 2017 ; Carrington et al. 2018 ; 2019 ; Cunneen 2018 ; Moosavi 2018 ). Our critique identifies three closely interrelated inclinations in the Southern criminology project which together amount to the subordination and demotion of more critical accounts of neo-coloniality, especially those which view it as an expansion of capitalist accumulation and a ‘constructive’ force in creating and sustaining class, gender and race.

Missing ‘empire?’

Carrington et al. argue that Southern criminology has the potential to attend to an important ‘missing element’ in many criminologies: ‘empire’ (2016: 5). They state they are concerned with the ‘historical role of state violence’ in the ‘expansion of colonialism’ ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 3). They indicate an interest in the ‘many worlds of violence’ ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 6) that are excluded from contemporary research foci. Our contrary claim is that Southern criminology is relatively limited in its theoretical interrogation of the nature of colonialism, especially in its contemporaneous form. Despite the declaration of bringing analyses of imperialism to the field of criminology, Southern criminology has not sought to identify or interrogate the contemporary nature of current structures of colonialism in a consequential or substantial manner. This is reflected in the introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology in the Global South ( Carrington et al. 2018 ) which offers up conceptualizations of ‘the South’ and even hints at convergences between North and South. The ‘core’ statements of the Southern criminology project, we contend, shy away from a direct and rigorous development of colonialism as continuing to reshape global social relations and sustain geographies of inequality and oppression.

In some instances when colonialism is discussed, it is primarily framed as a legacy of previous colonial processes rather than offering a systemic interrogation of today’s regimes of inequality. For instance, the historicization of colonialism is present in Carrington and Hogg’s ‘deconstruction of the origins of criminology’ (2017: 192–3) where they link troubled masculinities and gendered violence in Australia to legacies of colonization. They view current structures of oppression (both against women and Aboriginal communities) as primarily historically rooted. In a section towards the end of the article they state that ‘[V]violence played a key role in the British colonization of Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, arguing that the ‘legacies of colonisation and frontier violence reach into the present, through inter-generational trauma and loss, adversely impacting on indigenous health and wellbeing in myriad ways’ (2017: 191). Carrington and Hogg (2017 : 191) tend to highlight previous persecution as being transmitted through history by trauma, ignoring the critical significance of the ongoing destruction of Indigeneity ( Short 2010 ). While the apparent higher levels of domestic violence and child abuse amongst Indigenous Australians is noted, itself a frequently racist trope, the organized state-sanctioned repression is left underappreciated. Carrington and Hogg offer no serious recognition that settler colonialism requires ongoing state-led forms of racialized disempowerment such as those operating through child protection services ( van Krieken 2004 ) and carceral institutions. The subjugation of Indigenous Australians has continued to this very day through the destruction of Indigenous rights and a project of cultural assassination ( Short 2010 ; Wahlquist 2020 ). The point being that racism is mobilized by the state within continuing processes of colonization which establish and maintain inequities and specific modes of profit-making. It is not chiefly a legacy from the past. A similar criticism could be made about Hogg and Brown’s (2018) claim that the history of penal transportation is important for understanding current penal realities in Australia: seeking explanations through history downplays the racialized and class-based functions of carceral power today.

Few contributions in The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology in the Global South critically engage in criminological elaboration of existing imperialisms. Cunneen’s (2018) chapter, e.g., exploring the ‘Indigenous challenge’ to criminology largely focuses on the potential for alternative epistemologies (20–4) and focuses discussion on human rights as representing potential for political action. There is some recognition of ongoing forms of oppression against communities (27–9) but more intense recognition of the full systemic violent destruction of Indigeneity is not foregrounded. Targeted policing, law enforcement perpetrated and tolerated sexual violence, mass incarceration and land-grabbing are settler colonial processes bound up in Indigenous genocide. These themes sat more centrally in Cunneen’s (2001) earlier work.

Despite our critical comments, Southern criminology’s stated concern with widening the scope of criminology through developing better structures of inclusivity is commendable. We are suggesting that in many examples of current Southern criminology there is only a hint at what neo-coloniality might look like or its interconnection with current systems of criminalization and subjugation. This is despite the claim that it offers an interrogation of the interconnections between crime, empire and violence. At times an arguably more simplistic historicized version of colonialism is alluded to as an explanation for current oppressive practices within Global South and settler colonial societies. The predilection for suggesting that oppression is the heritage of ‘true’ colonialization might be explained by a general reticence towards critiquing Southern viewpoints. This logic, as we show in the next section, also tends towards a preoccupation with epistemological ‘revolution’ as holding the key to decolonization.

Epistemological transformation as decolonization

Perhaps the primary ‘innovation’ of Southern criminology has been to note the Western-centric knowledge practices of contemporary criminology ( Carrington et al. 2016 ; Brown 2018 ; Carrington et al. 2018 ; 2019 ; Walklate 2018 ). The Southern criminology advocates are correct to note that social science is undoubtedly metropole-focused. Alternative modes of knowledge production, such as Southern criminology, are then visualized as the vanguard of overcoming colonialism. Carrington et al. (2020b ), in the abstract for The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South , state that in ‘the contemporary world of high-speed communication technologies and porous national borders, empire building has shifted from colonizing territories to colonizing knowledge’, which means that ‘the question of whose voices, experiences and theories are reflected in discourse is more important now than ever before’ ( Carrington et al. 2020b : N/A). Stemming from this are two claims about the importance of transforming praxis. First, there is a claim that decolonizing criminology fundamentally requires representing the Global South voice ( Carrington et al. 2016 ; 2018 ; 2019 ). Second, there is a claim that Global South social issues are problematically explained using Global North theories ( Moosavi 2018 ; Walklate 2018 ).

Neither of these points are intrinsically problematic, but neither do they articulate the urgently needed dissection of the unjust outcomes of North/South inequalities. Southern criminology’s fixation on epistemology is encapsulated by the tendency to equate decolonization with the highlighting of Southern perspectives within the discipline. Criminological literature has overwhelmingly been produced in the Global North and Southern voices are neglected ( Aas 2012 ). Therefore, ‘adding new and diverse perspectives’ ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 2) from the South is welcomed. However, can it be presumed such voices are representative or that they offer emancipatory discourses?

At times, theoretical perspectives with Southern credentials are presented as innately more powerful, even when this might not be the case. Moosavi (2019) , for example, suggests that the Malay scholar Syed Hussein Alatas’ ideas may offer an appropriate Southern theoretical apparatus for criminology. While Alatas’ (1977) offers pertinent locally specific analysis of the dynamics of the historical roots of racialization in Southeast Asia, his work on corruption is, Moosavi argues, an example of Southern criminological theorizing (2019). However, Alatas’s theory of corruption barely mentions political economy and is largely individualistic. Alatas argues that corruption is the result of individual decisions by politicians and, again, a residual cultural leftover from colonial practices ( Moosavi 2019 : 235). Consequently, corruption in Alatas’ narrative is presented as a cultural ‘defect’ that influences morally wrong personal decisions of people in power, instead of a set of practices resulting from institutional arrangements, such as corporate lobbying or other elite power strategies ( Whyte 2015 ). The ongoing 1MDB scandal, in which vast amounts of Malaysian state’s wealth were privatized was only possible due to the international system of finance and the involvement of a range of actors from multinational corporations and large banking organizations ( Ramesh 2016 ). The list of ‘solutions’ offered by Alatas to tackle corruption also reproduces common policies such as harsher punishment (as if it is a problem of individual deterrence) and makes vague reference to political reform ( Moosavi 2019 : 236). Alatas’ position does not interrogate the relationship between power and corruption in a meaningful sense. Alatas suggests that religious texts can be a source of solutions to corruption ( Moosavi 2019 : 236), rather than recognizing that corruption emerges from problematic social relations themselves emergent from economic inequality. This brief critique of Alatas’ work raises questions about its claims to representativeness of subaltern interests. Scholarship originating in the Global South is not necessarily emancipatory, critical or automatically an example of decolonized knowledge production.

Sections within the Southern criminology literature also take issue with ‘Northern’ concepts for explaining Southern socio-political conditions arguably when there is no basis for doing so. This might be driven by a desire to debunk Western theorizing and defend the potential for Southern theorizing ( Carrington and Hogg 2017 ), even when not appropriate. In two separate publications, the explanatory power of Loic Wacquant’s thesis is criticized as being unable to explain emerging punitivist trends in Latin America ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 14; Sozzo 2018 ). The argument is that despite Latin America having been governed by leftist governments in the last decades, such as Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil or Kirchner in Argentina, punitivism has remained a common trend. The suggestion being that because these regimes express socialist or progressive objectives, rising incarceration rates cannot be explained in reference to neoliberalism ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 14; Sozzo 2018 : 661). Instead, Carrington et al. (2016) and Sozzo (2018) focus on domestic political events and the legal changes that shaped incarceration policies. They argue that rising intensity in state-carceral activities is a result of the political mobilization of punitive discourses by different local actors. The shortcoming here is the focus on seeking to discredit Wacquant’s thesis, instead of a more intense interrogation of the connections between political economy (rather than political discourse) and shifting trends in criminal justice.

Contrary to the analysis presented in Carrington et al. (2016) and Sozzo (2018) many Latin American scholars have argued that the allegedly ‘leftist’ governments did not make radical economic reforms, but continued to heavily rely on neo-colonial arrangements, such as extractive industries (e.g., copper, oil and coal), low labour-intensity farming and free trade policies ( Gago and Mezzadra 2017 ; Svampa 2019 ). To the extent, these regimes have implemented some progressive policies, but without fundamentally disrupting the neoliberal macroeconomic core, they have been defined as ‘post-neoliberal’ ( MacDonald and Ruckert 2009 : 7). The redistribution policies implemented by those post-neoliberal regimes ‘emerge from within neoliberalism’ and are aimed at mitigating the worst impacts of socio-economic inequality rather than bringing about more significant structural change ( Meltzer 2009 : 102). Policies developed in Latin America are partly compatible with Wacquant’s claim of neoliberal punitiveness: that the need to secure neoliberal insecurity is ‘characterized by the conjoint intensification of both social-welfare and penal interventions (rather than the replacement of one by the other…)’ ( Wacquant 2009 : 4). Rising incarceration in ‘socialist’ Latin American countries seems compatible with Wacquant’s basic account: the disciplinary apparatus shifted in response to neoliberal economic policy and resulting precarity. Growing social unrest and economic-related violence, an accompanying rise in fear of crime, race and class bias of the criminal justice system including an unwillingness of politicians to dismantle those punitive logics all provide a convincing ‘Wacquantian’ account of shifts in disciplinary apparatuses in Latin America.

These examples show that Southern criminology tends to uncritically favour scholarship originating from Global South. The underlying assumption is that Global South perspectives, in all their guises, must be more authentic. We have observed a romanticization of Global South scholars even when they present elitist or conservative outlooks. In the latter example, there is a rejection of Northern theory based on a claim about local specificities that we believe is not supported by evidence. This comes close to presenting Southern voices, perspectives and theories as emancipatory forces regardless of the interests they represent. Táíwò’s (2020) recently published and widely admired article noted the problems with institutionalizing ‘standpoint’ epistemologies. He argues that while certain actors’ insights benefit from their social position, certain people who are seen to ‘fit the bill’ are sometimes inserted into elite spaces, such as academia, ‘regardless of what they actually do or do not know, or what they have or have not personally experienced’ ( Táíwò 2020 : N/A). Again, we accept the urgent need for forms of radical democratization to undo the class and race-based eradication of Global South perspectives. But we also suggest greater sensitivity to the challenges we face in doing so. Táíwò points out that the vast majority of those experiencing the worst aspects of global discrimination are structurally ‘left out of the rooms of power’ (2020: N/A)—they are incarcerated, experiencing extreme poverty or threat of violence or without even access to basic modes of communication.

Reification of Southern institutions

A further focus within Southern criminology is the idea that Southern criminal justice interventions offer models for doing ‘real’ justice in the Global North. This kind of idea can be traced to Cohen (2017 [1988] : 194–6), who argued that local informal social control mechanisms from the Global South, such as community policing or restorative justice, should be preserved since they offer alternatives to negative tendencies inherent in Western systems. We suggest that this argument potentially falls into reification of Southern policies. A concern within Southern criminological project appears to be a search for the ‘discovery’ of a ‘hidden’ decolonized approach to criminal justice. This follows the ‘appropriation’ by the Global North of institutions developed in the Global South ( Braithwaite 2018 : 975). Examples of this trend are the attention given to the South African truth commissions—established to deal with the legacy of apartheid—and more recently, to criminal law which specifically punishes gender-motivated murder of women in Latin American countries ( Toledo 2017 ).

As a point of departure, we follow arguments by Carrington et al. (2020a) that women’s police stations in Latin America represent a truly emancipatory ‘step forward’ for women’s rights in these contexts. Carrington et al. (2020a) argue that women’s police stations—run by women and designed to explicitly respond to and prevent gender-based violence—empower women and challenge patriarchal social relations. Studying women’s police stations could be a welcome portrait of potentially alternative institutional arrangements to address violence, but the approach taken in the analysis seems overly driven by the desire to present a ‘good’ Southern policy model. First, it focuses on describing the policies implemented from the point of view of the institution, instead of exploring women’s struggle behind their implementation. Women’s police stations were first implemented in Brazil as a result of a long-standing campaign by organized feminist social movements challenging police dismissal of cases of violence against women ( MacDowell Santos 2005 : 1–4). However, the study explores its implementation in Argentina where the local authorities were seeking to comply with international treaties on women’s rights ( Carrington et al. 2020a ). This difference is crucial because if women’s police stations are to be fully emancipatory, they would need to reflect demands made within feminist struggle ( MacDowell Santos 2005 : 171–5). However, being embedded within the official police may tend to ‘spread bureaucratic power throughout society’ and carry ‘the risk of an official subversion of their radical possibilities’ ( Sharma 2006 : 79).

Women’s police stations could be interpreted as the state’s attempt to engage in minimal criminal justice reform to prevent more wide-ranging gendered emancipation. A ‘sticker plaster’ seeking to bolster state legitimacy and the traditional reproductive regime in the face of a crisis. Second, the study says very little about the social, political and cultural factors that shape this violence or the material conditions, such as economic marginalization, that women suffer in the police station locations. Women’s lesser socio-economic power and their institutionalized subservience within the family unit often underpin violence ( True 2012 ). Even if women police stations might have improved women’s access to justice, from a critical de-colonial approach, we need to question whether this really offers a form of gendered empowerment enabling economic and social independence. In other words, can minimal reforms in criminal justice systems ever be considered a type of decolonization?

It is important to acknowledge the violent role police forces play in Argentina and the rest of Latin America (and arguably in the vast majority of the Global South). The repressive functions of policing everywhere take a different deadly intensity in Southern regions ( Arias 2010 ; Alves 2014 ; Kreuzer 2016 ). In these contexts, violence perpetuated by state-repressive apparatuses is a central component for manufacturing social order. To complicate the matter further, the primary mode of organizing police and criminal justice in much of the Global South reflects Cold War efforts by various American institutions to shape policing around imperialist objectives including the quashing of almost all leftist organizing in any national context ( Schrader 2019 ; Cavalcanti and Garmany 2020 ). This social ‘order’ is often the instigation and maintenance of kleptocratic political economies centring on extractive activities, ‘indirect’ foreign influence and gross inequalities. Violence work is required to establish ‘[Z]zones of deregulation’ which are also ‘spaces of opportunity, of vibrant, desperate inventiveness and unrestrained profiteering’ ( Comaroff and Comaroff 2006 : 9). This focus on models-of-good practice hinders the urgent need to explore the role of state criminal justice practices and violence in enforcing neoliberal transformations.

So far, we have argued that Southern criminology has a proclivity for excluding rigorous analysis of neo-coloniality: it conceives the democratization of knowledge production as the core decolonizing strategy with accompanying project of celebrating Southern institutional responses to crime and justice. At times there is trivial critique of Northern theories in favour of Southern specificities and glorification of Southern perspectives and theory, regardless of its power to explicate social problems. There is also an exultation of Southern crime control institutions potentially indicative of a failure to take seriously the universal critique of criminalization and the more important emphasis on carceral state power in supporting structures of neo-colonization. Nonetheless, the project is laudable for pronouncing and foregrounding the blindness of criminology to Southern issues.

The rest of the paper advances a version of Southern criminology which intentionally weaponizes the social scientific imagination towards documenting and explicating the severe barbarism at the base of aggressive forms of inequality and accumulation in the world system. One opportunity is to ground Southern criminologies in a critique of the global political economy that has historically produced and currently reproduces forms of oppression and exploitation in the Global South. To do this, our contribution develops a certain conceptualization of neo-colonialism as always, although not exclusively, concerned with the elaboration and imbedding of market social relations according to the interests of certain powerful groups. We cannot understand the processes of neo-colonization without understanding the dominant modalities of accumulation and the accompanying structures of political domination. Attention to the global expansion and reformulation of capitalism is inextricably central to grasping the degradation of Global South lives ( Mies 1986 ; Federici 2008 ; Selwyn 2014 ; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018 ). A simplistic version of this view that imperialism and neo-colonialism are founded on the development of capital has been criticized for a tendency to class determinism ( Connell 2007 : 67). Grosfoguel (2006) seeks to transcend what he describes as the ‘Eurocentric’ focus on class preferring to explain coloniality through the concept of the ‘colonial power matrix’ which is an ‘entanglement of multiple and heterogeneous hierarchies (“heterarchies”) of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual, linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation’ (172). Undoubtedly there are various other structural dynamics working through, below and beyond the political economy dimensions of the global ‘development’. Nonetheless, Grosfoguel’s analysis provides a ‘list’ of oppressions but does not foreground an explanation of why different inequalities continue to exist or the relationship between them. Racializing and gendering oppressions are often partially explainable in relation to economic projects. For instance, negative stereotypes about certain groups are sometimes institutionally and ideologically asserted through cultural formations and state policies when it is conducive with economic modalities of labour discipline or developing new markets ( Mies 1986 ; Federici 2008 ). So while Grosfoguel is correct that any conception of neo-colonialization should foreground the complex matrixes of inequalities, this does not preclude analyses that seek to show the connections between materialist interests and domination. The production of racialized deprecating tropes through normative and institutional ‘work’ sustains deteriorated class statuses and is frequently central to reproducing systems of labour exploitation. Focusing on oppressions such as race and gender shows the propensity for hierarchies to be constructive of systems of extraction and exploitation, although such hierarchies also have their own structural significance.

At the level of the global order, imperialism and coloniality are closely related to ongoing economic contradictions in the ‘core’ as capital seeks compliance from labour, new markets for consumption and production and new investment opportunities ( Harvey 2003 ). Colonialism, in its broadest sense, is the exertion of political power over another territory or group in the interests of economic gain. Neo-colonialism is an attempt to conceptualize the prevailing contemporaneous forms of this process. Former Ghanian independence leader, Kwame N’Krumah (1966) , coined the term ‘neo-colonialism’ to describe the imperial maintenance of forms of dependence within the new phase of apparent Third World ‘freedom’ (see also Rodney 1981 ). He uncovered the various financialized and trade-based forms of domination operating through investment, capital flows and corporate power in Africa which sought profits but without social development. As Ahmad (2004) details, colonialisms are distinguishable: settler colonialism, direct occupation/governance of ‘foreign’ territories, particular practices of extraction by corporations or the ‘informal’ spread of technologies or ideologies which seek to reformulate social life (the global medicalization of mental distress, e.g.) are all distinct configurations.

The current phase of neo-colonization is distinguishable according to some general features. Processes have de-territorialized in certain capacities because of finance capital’s ascendency over industrial capital and America’s rise to global hegemon ( Ahmad 2004 ). Today, many aspects of colonial relations are organized through the Washington Consensus financial institutions which structure debt relations, institutionalize a system of wealth offshoring and require American dollar dependency. This supports the functioning of kleptocratic bourgeois classes within peripheral countries. The hegemonic myth of ‘development’ provides the global ideological justification for the grotesque levels of inequality ( Hickel 2017 ). Military tactics revolve around interventionism and collaboration or partnership with local forces rather than occupation. Wallerstein’s (2004) development of world-systems analysis remains useful for examining the global economy. The international division of labour on the planetary scale, with different regions and nations having specific roles in terms of production, consumption and distribution, grasps the manner in which economic processes are at once interdependent but distinct. Global divisions interconnect companies, states, various political institutions and status groups (i.e., races, classes and genders) in an integrated albeit unequal system ( Wallerstein 2004 ). Vast regional and international inequalities are entrenched within the structure of the world system as states and regions are locked in unequal chains of production and consumption. Selwyn (2014) shows that it is not inclusion/exclusion from capitalism that defines global inequality, as the propagators of the ‘development’ story would suggest, but the structuring of different intersecting class locations which create and sustain poverty. The neo-colonial global order contains genuinely novel features: the new global relations of debt crafting ‘innovative’ modes of wealth transference (alongside imposing vicious forms of poverty) or the hegemonic role of American culture in fashioning consumerist versions of ‘freedom’ ( Hickel 2014 ). It should not, however, be forgotten that ensuring compliance with the global financialized order frequently spills into ‘old skool’ tactics of military action albeit in the newer clandestine form of metropole facilitated or backed political coups ( Prashad 2020 ).

This paper is not advancing a reductive argument that the economic dimensions necessarily take precedence over others, but we are suggesting that a refocus on political economy dimensions of neo-colonialism offers an important lens for analysing crime and violence in the Global South. Neo-colonialism is an ongoing, albeit reformulated, force with strong strategic political dynamics as certain groups, organizations and actors seek to secure and accrue wealth. If we lose this point altogether, the various structures of neo-colonization stand as irrational or (again!) a cultural legacy from ‘real’ colonialism. Fraser and Jaeggi argue that capitalism needs to be understood as a materially and ideologically ‘institutionalized social order’ ( 2018 : 47; see also Mies 1986 ), to avoid economistic tendencies. Accumulation, whether it be by exploitation, expropriation or extraction, depends on an elaborate ‘back story’ ( Fraser and Jaeggi 2018 : 28): the requirement for the provision of reproduction, resting on gendered difference; a particular relation to ‘nature’; imperialism and racialization organizing and legitimizing geographical and class inequalities; and, a series of political organizational forms (law, electoral politics, state power) which balance coercion and consent and limit crisis tendencies.

Conceiving of neo-colonialism as a key site in the rearticulation of capital’s domination, with its complex cultural and political background story, provides a theoretical platform for competently explicating violence and criminalization in the Global South. Extending markets into new areas of social life or new territories can work through a range of institutional forms including symbolic meaning-making (i.e., such as denigration of certain groups legitimizing their degraded positionality), civil society organizations propagating the key myths about development or mitigating the worst aspects of poverty, corporate-led infrastructural projects, international governmental organizations and the coercive arms of political power (i.e., policing and military power). The following sections offer analyses of the interconnections between criminalization, inequality and harm in peripheral regions of the world system. First, we analyse the state-corporate construction of ‘regimes of permission’ ( Whyte 2014 : 237) as a central ‘creative’ force in instituting exploitation in Global South contexts. Second, utilizing the example of gender violence, we suggest that capitalist expansion establishes new forms of oppression that are supportive of transformations in market relations in Global South contexts. Finally, we note the continuing importance of criminal justice apparatuses in racialization for reproducing unequal social orders in poorer countries. In each of these examples, we highlight neo-coloniality’s inextricable interconnection with the ongoing expansionary logic and materialization of capital. Our intention is to bring, more formally, an analysis of neo-coloniality as a damaging coercive force to the Southern criminology endeavour.

State-corporate crime and regimes of extreme permission

Southern criminological analysis should document and understand the conditions and social processes that create and sustain suffering in the Global South. We seek to contribute to such a project here by revealing cooperation between corporate objectives, international financial organizations and local state power coalesce in arranging the legal, territorial and sociocultural conditions for state-corporate accumulation. The state-corporate crime literature offers Southern criminology an adequate analytical framework to explore those dynamics. State capacities such as law-making, regulatory apparatuses, labour regimes, financial systems, immigration policies, military power and even (at times) welfare state-creation are formative of the infrastructures required for corporate profiteering. Whether the advancement of such state structures is ‘development’ is highly contentious because this infrastructural elaboration is often entwined with violence, exploitation and environmental destruction ( Whyte 2014 : 240). Analysing state-corporate power should transcend definitions of ‘crime’ which tend to focus on the failure of states to assert regulatory compliance ( Whyte 2014 ). State-defined ‘criminalities’ or ‘noncompliance’ cannot offer a successful lens for analysing corporate damages because their impact on workers, consumers and the environment are not captured in the ‘crime’-category. The capacities of states (regional, national and inter/trans/supra-national) have a fundamental co-creative role in establishing strategies for corporate accumulation. It is not that states fail to intervene to prevent corporate wrongdoing, or simply that the state employs corporations to carry out their ‘dirty work’ ( Whyte 2014 ; Tombs and Whyte 2015 ). State power is a strategic set of spatio-temporal, material and ideological forces put into motion in the pursuit of outcomes and instrumental in the establishment and subsequent reproduction of capital.

Some existing critical criminological studies reveal the socially damaging effects of interrelated coordination of state-corporate activities in the Global South. Izarali (2016) explains that the partnership between elites and transnational corporations in the Niger Delta institutionalized a mode of oil extraction permitting large-scale gas flaring, consequently resulting in significant pollution whilst denying potential economic benefits to local populations. Ezeonu (2018) describes the kleptocratic nature of Nigeria’s economy, linking a whole host of socially deleterious consequences including severe poverty, military violence around the Niger Delta, declining access to healthcare and other core welfare rights, to a specific constitution of market relations. Certain sections of the Nigerian elite have partnered with large multinational corporations to create a highly extractive economy helped by World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies. Whyte’s (2007) analysis of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s rule in post-‘shock-and-awe’ Iraq uncovered the extensive application of legal and military tactics to enforce economic restructuring thus facilitating the short- and long-term extraction of wealth by American capital. Lasslett (2012) uncovered the Australian government’s clandestine support for counterinsurgency during the Bougainville conflict geared towards sustaining mining corporations’ access to the country’s rich mineral reserves.

EPZs represent a further example of the state-corporate creation of ‘regimes of permission’ ( Whyte 2014 : 237). EPZs are spaces of regulatory exemption and extreme corporate permission, institutionalized through intense state-infrastructural exertion. The instigation of EPZs requires the coordination of a host of ‘constructive’ state-corporate powers, including but not limited to: tax-incentive regimes including suspension of import–export duties and reduced corporation tax; significant physical investment in terms of ensuring reliable utilities supply, waste disposal, transport and other core services (frequently denied to the mass citizenry of those countries); development of labour regimes (i.e., regulations regarding union membership, hours, wages…); and, state efforts to arrange or encourage immigration from surrounding regions/nations. Arnold and Pickles study (2011) of the Mae Sot special economic zone located next to the Myanmar border in Thailand show the Thai state’s efforts to realize a quasi-legal liminal space for the extreme exploitation of workers from Myanmar. Police corruption, state-sanctioned violence and systemic flouting of labour laws are a core part of social life around Mae Sot revealing the complex interactions between official and unofficial state powers, imperative in creating conditions for the hyper-exploitation of labour. Improper disposal of toxic waste, violence against women employees by managers, extreme working hours, enablement of accompanying illicit trades in moneylending and sex work, underpaid wages and the murder of workers attempting to organize are well-documented experiences in EPZs in every corner of the globe. EPZs are the central sites of global commodity production, an embodiment of the core Global inequality between cores and peripheries and are one quintessence of the neo-colonial regime of corporate production.

The same could be said for certain forms of the intensive and large-scale agricultural development in many regions of the Global South. Plantations, such as those for palm oil, require the dispossession of Indigenous lands, precarious pay-per-weight regimes of labour exploitation, unregulated use of natural resources and the consequential destruction of the local ecosystem and, with it, alternative sources of subsistence. As Li (2018) described in her analysis of an Indonesian palm oil plantation, their operationality is dependant not only on the ‘legal’ support from the state, but also of the deployment of an insidious and widespread regime of corruption that shapes all interactions on the plantation. Once again, the extension of cheap palm oil production is at the base of the ever expanding corporate-led consumption of commodities such as food, cosmetics and biofuel.

A clear articulation of state-corporate capacity to ‘innovatively’ compose specific accumulation projects is a force with sometimes severely detrimental effects. Notably, however, the legal and infrastructural permission for corporate activities is constructed differently in Global South and North contexts. In this sense, corporate regimes have a certain geography in terms of the degree of ‘permission’ they are granted within different locations. The state-corporate crime literature has developed a sophisticated account of state-corporate activity but only partially theorized regulatory apparatuses as ‘mapping’ onto global inequalities. Current approaches to state-corporate power have focused on holding accountable corporations and their ‘home’ states legal infrastructure (i.e., where corporations were incorporated) and have neglected the particularities of the Global South. At the same time, Southern criminology has made very little mention of state and corporate activities as critically important for understanding neo-coloniality. Lasslett and MacManus’ (2018) analysis is the notable exception to this trend. They argued that the apparent symptoms of failure of states in the Global South, such as grand corruption or violent conflict, can be read as political arrangements that facilitate predatory forms of wealth extraction. Economic activity in the post-colony is frequently best understood as the flows of capital tactically constructed through systems of exploitation and dispossession.

Gender violence and gendered economics in the Global South

Carrington and colleagues argue that Southernizing criminology should involve a renewed consideration of gendered violence outside the ‘metropole’, to be sensitive to ‘the specificity of women’s diverse experiences across time, class, space, history, religion, economics, culture and geo-politics’ ( Carrington et al. 2016 : 10). We suggest that emphasizing the ‘differences’ should not be the only concern. Shifting patterns of gender violence, in certain contexts, reveals the close connection between the expansion of markets and forms of hierarchical sociocultural oppression. The institutionalization of neoliberal market relations and hierarchies of inequality in ‘developing’ countries frequently involves entrenching gender oppression. Rather than focusing on the specificities of gender violence in different contexts, a focus on shifting organizations of reproduction vis-à-vis the integration of localities into global chains of production offers a powerful explanation of violence against women. Violence against women is not epiphenomenal to the arrangement of the political economy ( True 2012 ) but is emergent from the rearticulating of gendered social relations within de-communalization and monetarization.

Federici (2004 ; 2008 ) explains violence against women in relation to capital’s primitive accumulation with the feminine devalued status as sex objects and mother being formed during the medieval witch-hunts and early phases of colonization: women’s social status was stripped from them rendering their bodies and labour subservient to the reproductive needs of the new economic system. Federici develops this historical account to examine witch-hunting in Africa today. These eruptions of misogyny, she claims, are not the result of pre-capitalist ‘traditional’ belief structures: they are ‘not a legacy of the past, but are a response to the social crisis that globalization and neo-liberal restructuring of Africa’s political economies have produced’ ( 2008 : 24). Contemporary globalization policies led by the World Trade Organization, IMF and World Bank weakened local economies across Africa thrusting many communities into deprivation ( Ogembo 2006 ). Rising commodity prices, declining access to education/healthcare and land reforms are refashioning the fabric of everyday social relations. Violence against women in the name of witch-hunting is part of a wider cultural devaluation of women, older people and pre-market forms as property-driven social relations take over.

Various forms of subjugation and repression for women are also connected to the feminization of the global labour force. Global South women employed in migrant domestic work, sex work or in EPZ factory employment have become quintessential figures in the contemporary ‘recolonized’ organization of productive and reproductive forces under globalization ( Parrenas 2015 ). In all these industries violence is bound up in the regulation of women’s behaviour. EPZs have an endemic problem with sexual violence, at times usefully could be described as part of the everyday disciplinary mechanism for achieving compliance from female workforces ( International Trade Union Confederation 2010 ). For migrant sex workers and domestic workers, illegality, reduced access to citizenship rights and the nature of the employment puts them at increased risk of various forms of physical, emotional and financial abuse ( Piper 2003 ).

Our argument is not that violence against women is played out according to the same set of logics in every Global South context. Or that the myriad forms of neo-coloniality will intersect with gender in a predetermined manner in shaping experiences for women in or from Southern contexts. But we argue that forms of gendered violence are constitutive of new forms of production and expanding market relations which are integrated into the global capitalist logic of value creation. Gender constitutes the planetary unequal system of production and reproduction ( Mies 1986 ; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018 ). The categories developed by critical feminist analysis, such as the social construction of gender roles and the capitalist organization of labour into production and reproduction, should form the basis for uncovering new intersections between gender, class and race in the ever-evolving world system.

Racialized and class-based criminalization regimes in the Global South

Criminality, immorality and deviance are politically ascribed social positions, not necessarily reflections of ontological reality. This revelation arguably forms a central area of interrogation in critical criminological discussion ( Hall et al. 1978 ; Cohen 2011 [1972] ). Criminal justice responses frequently reflect ongoing priorities of the capitalist state and dominant economic forces ( Hillyard and Tombs 2007 ). As yet, Southern criminology has not systematically applied the revelation to the politics of criminalization in the Global South.

Crucially Global South socio-economic systems have been constituted and moulded through and beyond colonial racism, enabling brutal economic exploitation and ensuring the fragmentation of subalternity. As Mbembe (2019) has argued, penalization is historically central mechanisms for achieving domination, with subservience enforced through these modes of violent discipline. Policing and prisons continue to be central to manufacturing localized racialized social orders in Global South regions ( Brogden 1987 ; Clarke 2018 ). Neocleous (2011) argues that the original destructive and highly coercive instigation of colonial regimes requires intense military violence that frequently gives way to a slightly softer, albeit still violent, form of pacification . Security becomes less about forcible compliance but rather about ‘ordering the social relations of power around a particular regime of accumulation’ and focused on the ‘enemy within’ and ‘suspect communities’ ( Neocleous 2011 : 200–1). As noted earlier, whether this pacification is achieved to the same level in ‘ordering’ Southern contexts is open to analysis ( Comaroff and Comaroff 2006 ). A Southern criminological project would do well to be critically aware of the role of state institutions in reproducing racialized violence ensuring neo-colonial economic exploitation. The documentation of that racialized violence should be a priority of any study of the criminal justice systems in the Global South.

Criminal justice institutions in the Global South are key modalities of state repression for maintaining and constituting neo-colonized social orders, such as ensuring compliance with local labour regimes or sustaining racial hierarchies. For instance, the impact of neoliberal policies on imprisonment rates across Latin America has been noted ( Iturralde 2019 ). Carceral institutional power intently directed at marginal groups is observable in the post-colonial context, such as the policing of Myanmar workers in Mae Sot ( Arnold and Pickles 2011 ) or Afro-Brazilian populations in Rio’s Favelas ( Cavalcanti and Garmany 2020 ). Some studies have also explored the politics of international financial institutions, particularly the IMF, in legitimizing brutal campaigns such as the persecution of the Timor-Leste population ( Stanley 2009 ) and the Rwandan genocide ( Rothe et al. 2009 ). Other authors have unveiled the economic rationality behind state violence, such as Sassen’s (2017) analysis of the Rohingya genocide. She convincingly argued that state-led racialization and military campaign enables vast stretches of land to be grabbed from smallholders since the 1990s. These tragic examples show the need to understand racism in relation to economic practices instead of treating it as cultural trait or a mere reflection of the colonial past. State-arranged persecution through criminalization or even ethnic genocide is entwined with configurations of classed and racialized social divisions.

Even where racism is not the guiding force for sustaining class divisions through criminalization, class can be significant. Recent developments in the Philippines pertaining to Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ campaign have resulted in more than 20,000 people killed by police and para-military groups and more than 100,000 detained ( Ciocchini 2019 ). This brutal campaign is bound up in an economically oppressive system seeking to manage the gross inequalities in wealth emerging from the neo-liberalization of the economy ( Kusaka 2017 ). Decades of macroeconomic growth in the Philippines has been structured through IMF and World Bank policies but has also impoverished and marginalized a large section of the poor ( Garrido 2019 : 43–5). Such class inequality has fostered anxiety among the newly emerging middle class and elite. Duterte’s violence seems reasonably explicated as an attempt to recast ongoing problems of insecurity and inequality as the moral depravity of drug users and criminal elements ( Curato 2017 ).

These examples illustrate the existence of the various forms of ‘unofficial’ albeit state-organized oppression deployed in the Global South. This violence is constantly crossing the threshold of legality set by the state itself. Legal limits are frequently blurred with the participation of non-regular forces (in many cases members of organized crime) in state-sponsored violence. However, this apparently chaotic deployment of ferocity is far from directionless, playing instead a role in the maintenance of unequal social orders. Critically, the crafting of racial categories operating through penalization, criminalization and the cultural production of deviance to naturalize material inequalities is as much a force in Global South contexts as Global North. Explaining the role of state violence in managing poor and racialized groups is a long-running tradition in critical criminology and clearly represents a potential opportunity for Southern criminology.

Dominant narratives of ‘development’ see the Global South as backward and corrupt with progress imagined as inclusion in the apparently liberating forces of modern capitalism. This paper, in contrast, has sought to chart some of the economic relational forces which extend across the planet and, we contend, form a series of injustices, including structurally enforced poverty, unfettered extraction and exploitation and systemically embedded domination based on race, gender and class. A Southern criminology more clearly geared towards making visible the economic relations of neo-colonialism is also better fitted to mapping the criminological pains resulting from global disparities. Thus, whilst Southern criminology has usefully demanded that we begin to empirically and theoretically engage with crime and violence as structurally shaped by inequalities in the global system, the current priorities in the research may undermine the potential to realize this aim. Many dimensions of neo-coloniality are not conceptually embedded within Southern criminology with a tendency to see the social structures of colonization as largely knowledge-orientated or as historical ‘hangovers’ from proper colonialism. Second, the task of decolonization is presented as primarily an epistemological affair which leads to a reification of Southern voices, theories and actors. Lastly, we suggested that there was a tendency to emphasize examples of Southern crime control that are somehow emancipatory or empowering, a reification of Southern institutions. By focusing on state-corporate crime, political economies of gendered violence and state-organized systems of racialization through criminalization we proposed a focus on the forging of global inequality through state power and modalities of accumulation.

We claim that Southern criminology needs to direct its attention to the complex manifestations of neo-colonialism to offer a profounder analysis of harm in the Global South. Such an agenda would mean that Southern criminology joins long-standing traditions within decolonizing thought centred on exposing and explicating the savage mistreatment and economic logics at the heart of imperialism.

We are grateful to Laura Naegler for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this article. We would also like to thank the reviewers and editors for their thoughtful comments which were crucial for developing the arguments. All errors are our own.

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The Import of Southern Criminology

Post-colonialism trumps the defiance of universalism.

Ana Paula Zimmermann de Meireles Philippi (Author)

Southern Criminology is a post-colonial movement of knowledge production that has political, empirical and theoretical facades. This article argues that the most significant characteristic of Southern Criminology is the highlighting of the everlasting criminogenic effects of colonialism. It challenges the suggestion made by Roger Matthews, in his paper “False starts, wrong turns and dead ends: Reflections of recent developments in Criminology,” that the greatest import of such a movement is the defiance of universalism of the theories of the Global North. It does so by examining the concepts of Southern Criminology, the risks of recognising the defiance of universalism as its main output and the potentialities of recognising its post-colonial characteristics for the advancement of theoretical criminology both in the Global South and the Global North.

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Southern Criminology

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Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias.

This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology’s long fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism, itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the Global South; uncovering criminology’s colonial legacy, perhaps best exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South.

Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global criminology in the twenty-first century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 | 31  pages, southern criminology and cognitive justice, chapter 2 | 40  pages, violence, gender, and the global south, chapter 3 | 27  pages, rethinking race and crime from the global south, chapter 4 | 43  pages, southern penalities, chapter 5 | 39  pages, environmental injustice and the global south, chapter 6 | 16  pages, southernising criminology.

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• DOI: 10.4324/9781315194585
• Corpus ID: 240170884

Southern Criminology

• K. Carrington
• Published 18 September 2018
• Sociology, Political Science

262 Citations

Criminologies of the global south: critical reflections, southern criminologies, indigenous stories and qualitative research, asian criminology: its contribution in linking global north and south.

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Mapping the Pains of Neo-Colonialism: A Critical Elaboration of Southern Criminology

The idea of a southern criminology, for a ‘marginal criminological realism’: zaffaroni and the birth of a critical perspective on the criminal question from the global south, green activist criminology and the epistemologies of the south.

• 18 Excerpts

The international emergence of rural criminology: Implications for the development and revision of criminological theory for rural contexts

Asian criminology and non-western criminology: challenges, strategies, and directions, 94 references, masculinity, rurality and violence, asian criminology – challenges, opportunities, and directions, legal injustices: the zina hudood ordinance of pakistan and its implications for women, rewriting and reclaiming history: an analysis of the emergence of restorative justice in western criminal systems, restorative justice, policing and insurgency: learning from pakistan, zina and the moral regulation of pakistani women, crafting the neoliberal state: workfare, prisonfare, and social insecurity1, state crime on the margins of empire: rio tinto, the war on bougainville and resistance to mining, policing the rural crisis.

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Globalization, Frontier Masculinities and Violence: Booze, Blokes and Brawls

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Green Crime in the Global South

Essays on Southern Green Criminology

• © 2023
• David R. Goyes 0

University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

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• Gathers a diversity of thinkers from the global South
• Presents an overview of environmental crime affecting the ecosystems, humans and animals inhabiting the global South
• Explores the degradation of the global South's natural environments to satisfy the desires of the global North

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology (PSGC)

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Table of contents (12 chapters)

Front matter, southern green criminology: fundamental concepts.

David R. Goyes

Drivers of Green Crime in the Global South

The state-corporate crime of extractive industries.

• María Laura Böhm

Mass Extraction and Green Crime Victimization in Turkey

• Halil Ibrahim Bahar

Environmental Exploitation and Violence Against Indigenous People in Mexico

• Gabriela Gallegos Martínez, José Luis Carpio Domínguez, Jesús Ignacio Castro Salazar

Appropriating the Commons: Tea Estates and Conflict Over Water in Southern Malawi

• Dave Mankhokwe Namusanya

Political Economy and the Government Attack on Sharks: A Non-Speciesist Southern Green Criminology

• Reece Walters, Amy Couper

Responses to Environmental Crime in the Global South

Green potential in the global south: the phulbari movement in neoliberal bangladesh.

• Nikhil Deb, Avijit Chakrabarty Ayon

Latin American Green Criminology and the Limits of Restorative Justice: An Analysis of the Samarco Case

• Cristina Rego de Oliveira, Daniela Arantes Prata, Bruna dos Santos L. da Silva

Beyond Retributive Justice: Listening to Environmental Victims’ Demands in Brazil

• Marília de Nardin Budó, Karine Ágatha França, Lorenzo Natali

Pop Culture as Environmental Education in Japan: The Case of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kaze-no-tani-no-Naushika

• Orika Komatsubara

Global Dialogues About Crime and Destruction in the South

Revisiting rosa: eco-bio-genocide, drug wars, and southern green criminology.

• Nigel South

Colonialism, Knowledge, and the White Man’s Burden

Back matter.

• crime prevention
• environmental sociology
• political ecology
• environment
• animal studies
• environmental crime
• environmental justice
• victimology
• criminology in the global south
• restorative justice
• victimisation
• crimes against animals
• indigenous justice

About this book

“Many of us who write about corporate and state crime are neglectful of the legacies of colonialism. Green Crime in the Global South is a fine collection, edited by Colombian scholar David R. Goyes, that corrects this neglect. Overwhelmingly written by scholars from the Global South, this beautifully integrated book takes Green Criminology to a new place with a searing emphasis on state corporate crime. It weaves together thoughtful plurality in perspectives from all corners of the planet. Goyes has curated a splendid conversation for the planet that positions Southern Green Criminology to transcend colonial legacies.” ( John Braithwaite , Australian National University and University of Maryland, USA)

Editors and Affiliations

About the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : Green Crime in the Global South

Book Subtitle : Essays on Southern Green Criminology

Editors : David R. Goyes

Series Title : Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27754-2

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology , Law and Criminology (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-27753-5 Published: 26 June 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-27756-6 Due: 26 July 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-27754-2 Published: 24 June 2023

Series ISSN : 2946-269X

Series E-ISSN : 2946-2703

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXI, 323

Number of Illustrations : 1 b/w illustrations, 11 illustrations in colour

Topics : Critical Criminology , Criminology and Criminal Justice, general , Victimology , Environmental Policy , Sociology, general , Civil Law

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Free Southern Criminology Essay Example

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Criminology , World , Criminal Justice , Perspective , European Union , Law , Justice , Supreme Court

Words: 2250

Published: 08/20/2021

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Southern Criminology is a contemporary perspective in criminology and criminal justice that encompasses criminal and law enforcement practices of the Global South. However, it is not new, as it derives from the century-long practices of colonization, oppression, and ignorance of the global periphery. With all of its peculiarities, terms, and features, the concept of southern criminology is initially about raising questions on the epistemology of criminal justice in a contemporary highly diverse and globalized environment. It is about the use and establishment of power relations in the production of criminological knowledge (Carrington, et al., 2017). On the other hand, southern criminology presupposes a theoretical perspective aimed at shifting the focus from the state criminal justice processes to global inequalities, transnational crime, and postcolonial politics (Travers, 2019). Paying attention to the contemporary rise of social and economic inequalities in the geopolitical relationships and understanding the higher number of people appearing under the scope and scale of southern criminology, a recent interest in the topic has become tremendously huge among scholars to reconsider and revise power relationships and criminal practices between the Global North and Global South but from the perspective of the latter. Therefore, with a variety of critical approaches and strategies in theory and practice, southern criminology reveals a largely underestimated and ignored sphere of criminal justice and criminology in the global context of its origins, links with other perspectives, and relation to the development of criminology, and its reflection and response to the challenges of the 21 st century.

In the course of the Western and trans-Atlantic dominance in the world arena, the Global South has been outside of the main breakthroughs and transformations initiated and further maintained by western countries. In turn, the locus of the crime-and-punishment relationships associated with the ways to cope with them and sustain the social equilibrium in terms of the theoretical approach by Durkheim is getting more critical today. It touches on the colonization period, oppression of the indigenous people and occupied countries with local populations, and vision of modernity pursued solely by the developed western countries and those referred to the Western world. The colonization legacy has largely turned into a new paradigmatic shift of neo-colonialism fueled by the global capitalistic relationships that have left a deep imprint in the field of global criminal justice and criminology with its various perspectives.

According to Carrington, et al. (2018), global western influences and colonial heritage are not only about colonizing territories, as it is also about colonizing knowledge with a small bulk of countries (the US and the UK) of the Global North comprising 15% of the global population (versus 85% referred to the Global South) and producing half of the global academic knowledge. Because of the dominant academic thought in criminology coming mainly from Western countries with their power relationships based on the state provisions and institutions to take control over crime rates, the same approach in analyzing and evaluating criminal justice of the Global South is largely undervalued and ignored. Hence, western scholars have raised awareness of this field of inquiry to develop a theoretical framework so that to theorize and conceptualize a deeper and interrelated meaning of southern criminology.

Along with the colonial past, other features refer to the population diversity and ethical concerns highlighted in different countries and related to the Global South. The main features of the Global South that draw attention on the part of the representatives of the Global North relate to global inequalities associated with scarce resources and the lack of access to equal education, healthcare, housing, gender, and income (Carrington, et al., 2018). In turn, the problems associated with crime rates and diversification of criminal activities are not that huge in scope compared to the constant military conflicts, poverty, famines, epidemics, and violation of human rights, and other crimes threatening human security in Third World countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America, etc. It is exactly what drives a theoretical approach to understand the causes and ongoing issues in the context of southern criminology: “Theory travels well when it transmits imaginative resources that inspire one’s own genealogical explorations, thus giving due weight to the historical antecedents of contemporary practices” (Steinbeck, 2016, p. 514). Thus, southern criminology should be perceived and further conceptualized and evaluated through the lens of cognitive justice because “there is no justice without cognitive justice” (Cited in Carrington, et al., 2018, p. 1). The criminal situation in these countries is more severe, complicated, and devastated based on the lack of research initially occupied and dominated by the investigations and thoughts of Western authors and from their position without putting more emphasis on the problem from the inside.

The colonial origin of southern criminology is also commensurate with the theoretical intricacies. The dominant role and place of the Northern theories and constructive approaches for normal social development under the international declarations and resolutions do not fully describe the theoretical background of criminal activities in the Global South. As long as the global criminology was for a long time a prerogative of the Global North in terms of the academic enterprise, southern criminology seeks to get rid of this bias by enlarging the criminological imagination to encompass experiences and ideas from the Global South (Carrington, et al., 2018). In this respect, a variety of different theoretical approaches used predominantly in the field of criminology need further extension after an in-depth evaluation of the aggregate experiences of criminal activity and situation in the countries related to the Global South. To a degree, it is also a responsibility of the Global North because of the harm and degradation caused by the long-lasting period of colonization and further geopolitical transformations as a result of decolonization in the previous century.

In the development of criminology, the perspective of southern criminology aligns with the ongoing highly connected and globalized world. Transnational criminal groups and syndicates emerge on the basis of natural and human resources of the Global South and tend to increase the scope of their activities as long as the problem of southern criminology is largely behind the scenes of the contemporary global perspectives in criminology. A common judgment on the imperfect realization of the ways to modernize universal theories and laws of development pursued by the developed societies of the Global North runs into a ‘deficit in recognition and circulation’ of the Global South, leading to the theoretical framework of metropolitan thinking that holds the historical perspective of colonization and conquest being initially emblematic of western capitalist modernity (Carrington, et al., 2017). Overall, as societies from the Global South are still stagnant to modernize and deal with the socio-economic and political issues, the criminal situation remains to be largely unsolvable and complicated without adding new theoretical approaches for better evaluation of the problem. In the context of cosmopolitanism, southern epistemologies bring about “unconditional inclusiveness of marginalized voices” (Bosworth & Hoyle, 2012, p. 417). Carrington, et al. (2017, p. 2) perceive southern criminology aimed at rectifying the omissions of western capitalist modernity “by adding new and diverse perspectives to criminological research agendas to make them more inclusive and befitting of the world in which we live.” Overall, the theoretical framework and current approaches to southern criminology should be reflexive rather than reductive in highlighting and classifying modern perspectives in the multifaceted body of crime rates and criminal activity in the Global South.

Admittedly, there are various challenges to the perspective of southern criminology in terms of the 21 st century and its frantic-paced, ever-changing, and technology-savvy environment. For instance, increasing social diversity as a result of migration adds significantly to the population composition, creating new challenges and conflict situations that may arise between the two parties. However, one should be careful in identifying these terms sensibly and accurately so that to bring about more social equality or at least highlighting the social vices of sexism, racism, social inequality, and social neglect. Different criminological issues covering southern criminology and criminal justice are controversial but still consequential in their approach:

If southern criminology is to flourish in all its potential diversity, it must challenge the epistemological dominance of metropolitan thought. Southern criminology does not offer another form of opposition so much as a series of projects of retrieval. Its purpose is not to denounce but to re-orient, not to oppose but to modify, not to displace but to augment (Carrington, et al., 2017, p. 3).

In terms of social diversity, liberal movements, more tolerance, and raising social awareness of the new issues associated with widespread diversity non-acceptance, it is important to emphasize the need for shifting power relations and gender roles in the previously traditional society versus contemporary discourse on gender equality for all ethnicities, races, and religions to be under the universalized idea of southern criminology as having nothing to do with these terms, doing in the opposite way and following the primitive perspective of the state of nature by Thomas Hobbes. However, the way this new perspective aims to examine the field of criminology in the Global South is astonishing in that it makes a reverse and reflexive, at the same time, approach to the state policies and cognitive dominance of the Global North in the international criminology thought.

On the other hand, there is another global challenge to researching and further evaluating the southern criminology perspective in terms of the shifting paradigms of living in short-term and long-term perspectives. It is commensurate with the idea of shifting power relationships between generations and men and women, also in the context of the LGBTQI+ community. These complex questions in non-modernized and quite violent societies are likely to take place, and the need for predicting these impulsive and quite controversial intentions of the criminals and criminal groups should be researched more thoroughly. It is what Bosworth & Hoyle (2012, p. 140) conceptualize amid southern learning “impacting directly on criminological theorizations in, and off, the North.” From the critical perspective of social relations and the highly mobilized movement of individuals globally under the need for keeping globalization going on, the whole picture is still disruptive.

In the context of complex gender relationships in society when introducing a genuinely western perspective, new types of behavioral patterns and unique social experiences within southern criminology should be revealed, classified, and put into practice. This is a hard task for the averagely new perspective within the discipline of global (western) criminology and criminal justice further evident in the international bodies of criminal justice. The historic precedents of the North narratives on modern life through the lens of categorical judgment deriving from Europeans have influenced metropolitan thinking resting on the linear and panoramic appreciation of space and time (Carrington, et al., 2018). Everything related today to southern criminology is just a tip of an iceberg full of new precedents, methods, and strategies applicable uniquely to new cases in this perspective on global criminology.

Therefore, this study has shown the uniqueness and importance of studying southern criminology amid the demographic explosion, economic crises, pandemics, and other global issues affecting the next steps in human development and growth. As a consequence of the dominant possession of academic knowledge mainly in the hands of western societies, southern criminology has become a recent attempt of global criminologists to conceptualize and further apply new practices to withstand the growth of criminal activities locally, regionally, and globally. Without a proper approach to diminishing the influences of the conservative narrow-minded perspective of ignorance and discrimination, it is impossible to have a new historical, economic, and criminal perspective of the ongoing global transformation that may affect the normal development of modernity in different parts of the world. In other words, different studies have already identified the growing influence of southern criminology on the updates and revisions of the modern western criminological thought, which is largely impossible to change. Overall, contemporary efforts in identifying and further theorizing southern criminology should not necessarily avoid the western perspective, as these two entities were dynamically developing in the context of the colonizer-versus-colonized perspective.

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Reference List

Bosworth, M. & Hoyle, C., 2012. What is Criminology?. Oxford: OUP Oxford.

Carrington, K. et al., 2018. Southern Criminology. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

 Carrington, K., Hogg, R. & Sozzo, M., 2017. Southern Criminology. The British Journal of Criminology, January, 57(1), pp. 1-20.

 Steinbeck, J., 2016. How Well Does Theory Travel? David Garland in the Global South. The Howard Journal, December, 55(4), pp. 514-531.

 Travers, M., 2019. The idea of a Southern Criminology. International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 43(1), pp. 1-12.

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Biking Through Southern France, and History

The Canal du Midi traverses the Occitanie region and gives cyclists of all skill levels access to parts of France that are rich in lore, yet sometimes passed over by visitors.

By William Fleeson

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Southern Criminology

2015, British Journal of Criminology

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Luiz Phelipe Dal Santo

Beverly Yuen Thompson

The Palgrave Handbook of Australian and New Zealand Criminology, Crime and Justice

Chris Cunneen

Brodie Evans , Erin O'Brien

Feminist Legal Studies

Diamond Ashiagbor

Jarrett Blaustein

Caribbean Journal of Criminology

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Sappho Xenakis

The Routledge Companion to Rehabilitative Work in Criminal Justice

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Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South

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Tyrone Kirchengast

International Journal for Crime, Justice, and Social Democracy

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Marilena Drymioti

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Elektrostal

Elektrostal Localisation : Country Russia , Oblast Moscow Oblast . Available Information : Geographical coordinates , Population, Altitude, Area, Weather and Hotel . Nearby cities and villages : Noginsk , Pavlovsky Posad and Staraya Kupavna .

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Elektrostal Demography

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State Housing Inspectorate of the Moscow Region

Phone 8 (496) 575-02-20 8 (496) 575-02-20

Phone 8 (496) 511-20-80 8 (496) 511-20-80

Public administration near State Housing Inspectorate of the Moscow Region