Southern Criminology and Global Justice

• In Event: Future Directions in Global Criminology

Abstract

Almost 85% of the world’s population, a large proportion of the world’s police, and around half of the world’s 10.2 million prisoners live in the ‘global South,’ and yet criminology has concentrated mostly on problems of crime and justice in the Global North. Where criminology has taken root in the global South it has tended to borrow and adapt metropolitan assumptions, stunting the intellectual development and vitality of criminology. Southern criminology aims to fill this void by transforming criminological agendas to make them more befitting, inclusive of and responsive to the global problems of justice and security. Southern criminology seeks to internationalize and democratize criminological practice and knowledge away from its Anglophone northern bias, to renovate its methodological approaches, and to inject innovative perspectives from the periphery. It is primarily concerned with the analysis of networks and interactions linking South and North but which have been obscured by the metropolitan hegemony over criminological thought. Southern criminologists can contribute to criminological discourse in part by examining forms and patterns of crime specific to the global periphery, and how these patterns are gendered and shaped by diverse cultural, social, religious, and political factors steeped in colonial and local histories.

Authors

• Kerry Carrington, Queensland University of Technology

• Russell Hogg, Queensland University of Technology

• John Scott, Queensland University of Technology

• Maximo Sozzo, Universidad Nacional de Litorel / Queensland University of Technology