Decolonizing the Criminal Question - Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems

This volume explores the uneasy relationship between crime, crime control and colonialism, foregrounding the relevance of the legacies of this relationship to criminological enquiries. It invites and pursues a better understanding of the links between imperialism and colonialism on the one hand, and nationalism and globalisation on the other.

List of contents

• Foreword


• Introduction


• Part 1: Unsettling Concepts and Perspectives


• 1: Chris Cunneen: Decoloniality, Abolitionism, and the Disruption of Penal Power


• 2: John Moore: Abolition and (De)colonization: Cutting the Criminal Questions Gordian Knot


• 3: Manuel Iturralde: The Weight of Empire: Crime, Violence, and Social Control in Latin America - and the promise of Southern Criminology


• 4: Biko Agozino: From Genocidal Imperialist Despotism to Genocidal Neocolonial Dictatorship: Decolonizing criminology and criminal justice with indigenous models of democratisation


• Part 2: Contextualizing the Criminal Question


• 5: Zoha Waseem: The Postcolonial Condition of Policing? Exploring Policing and Social Movements in Pakistan and Nigeria


• 6: Gail Super: Extrajudicial Punishment and the Criminal Question: The case of postcolonial South Africa


• 7: Mahuya Bandyopadhyay: Carceral Cultures in Contemporary India


• Part 3: Locating Colonial Duress


• 8: Sarah Ghabrial: "Muslims have no borders, only horizons": A genealogy of border criminality in Algeria and France 1844 to present


• 9: Omar Phoenix Khan: The Coloniality of Justice: Naturalised divisions during pre-trial hearings in Brazil


• 10: Maayan Ravid: Contextualizing Racialized Exclusion in Criminalization in Postcolonial Israel: Policing of Israeli Ethiopian Citizens and Detention of Sudanese and Eritrean Asylum Seekers


• 11: Hugo Leonardo Rodrigues Santos: Coloniality and Structural Violence in the Criminalization of Black and Indigenous Populations in Brazil


• Part 4: Mapping Global Connections


• 12: Conor O'Reilly: Emancipatory Pathways or Postcolonial Pitfalls? Navigating global policing mobilities through the atlantic archipelago of Cape Verde


• 13: Melanie Collard: "Nothing is Lost, Everything is ... Transferred": Transnational institutionalization and ideological legitimation of torture as a postcolonial state crime


• 14: Lucy Harry: The Legacy of Colonial Patriarchy in the Current Administration of the Malaysian Death Penalty: The hyper-sentencing of foreign national women to death for drug trafficking


• Part 5: Moving Forward: New Methods and Approaches


• 15: Rod Earle, Alpa Parmar, and Coretta Phillips: Criminal Questions, Colonial Hinterlands, Personal Experience: A symptomatic reading


• 16: Lucia Bracco Bruce: Ayllu and Mestizaje: A decolonial feminist view of women's imprisonment in Peru


• 17: Amanda Wilson: An Alternative Spotlight: Colonial legacies, therapeutic jurisprudence and the enigma of healing


• 18: Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill and Ahmed Ajil: In Our Experience: Recognizing and challenging cognitive imperialism


• Conclusion: Teasing Out the Criminal Question, Building a Decolonizing Horizon

About the author

Ana Aliverti is a Professor of Law at the School of Law, University of Warwick. She holds a D.Phil. in Law (Oxford, 2012), an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Distinction, Oxford, 2008), an MA in Sociology of Law (IISL, 2005) and a BA in Law (Honours, Buenos Aires, 2002). Her research explores questions of national identity and belonging in criminal justice, and of law, sovereignty and globalisation. She has led extensive empirical work in the UK's criminal justice and immigration systems. She is the author of Crimes of Mobility (Routledge, 2013) and Policing the Borders Within (OUP, 2021). She was co-awarded the British Society of Criminology Best Book Prize for 2014, and has received the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (BARSEA) (2015), the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law (2017), and the British Journal of Criminology's Radzinowicz Prize. She is co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and the Associate Director of Border Criminologies.

Henrique Carvalho's research interests lie in the areas of criminal law, criminalisation and punishment, and legal, social, political and cultural theory. He joined the University of Warwick in September 2015, having previously worked as a Lecturer in Law at City, University of London, a Visiting Lecturer at King's College London and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the London School of Economics.

Anastasia Chamberlen's research interests lie in the areas of theoretical criminology, the sociology of punishment and prisons, feminist theory and theoretical debates in the study of emotions, embodiment and the arts in criminal justice. Having previously worked as a lecturer in criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, she joined Warwick's Sociology Department in 2016 as Associate Professor of Sociology.

Over the last 25 years Máximo Sozzo has completed research in different areas of contemporary criminology, always with a focus on Latin America and Argentina. He is now working on prisons and power, historical transformations of punishment, the mechanisms of sentencing without trial, and the travels of ideas about the criminal question across the Global North and South.

Summary

Within the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between criminal law, punishment, and imperialism, or the contours and exercise of penal power in the Global South. Decolonizing the Criminal Question is the first work of its kind to comprehensively place colonialism and its legacies at the heart of criminological enquiry.

By examining the reverberations of colonial history and logics in the operation of penal power, this volume explores the uneasy relationship between criminal justice and colonialism, bringing relevance of these legacies in criminological enquiries to the forefront of the discussion. It invites and pursues a better understanding of the links between imperialism and colonialism on the one hand, and nationalism and globalization on the other, by exposing the imprints of these links on processes of marginalization, racialization, and exclusion that are central to contemporary criminal justice practices. Covering a range of jurisdictions and themes, Decolonizing the Criminal Question details how colonial and imperial domination relied on the internalization of hierarchies and identities — for example, racial, geographical, and geopolitical — of both the colonized and the colonizer, and shaped their subjectivity through imageries, discourses, and technologies.

Offering innovative, conceptual, and methodological approaches to the study of the criminal question, this work is an essential read for scholars not only focused on criminology and criminal justice, but also for scholars in law, anthropology, sociology, politics, history, and a range of other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Decolonizing the Criminal Question is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Product details

• Authors: Ana (Professor of Law Aliverti
• Assisted by: Ana Aliverti (Editor), Aliverti Ana (Editor), Henrique Carvalho (Editor), Carvalho Henrique (Editor), Anastasia Chamberlen (Editor), M^D'aximo Sozzo (Editor), Máximo Sozzo (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 08.06.2023
• EAN: 9780192899002
• ISBN: 978-0-19-289900-2
• No. of pages: 416
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; Globalization, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General, LAW / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Globalization, Anthropology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / General, Crime and criminology, Crime & criminology, Law & society, Law and society, sociology of law