Criminology, globalisation, nomos: Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth as key to re- locating the criminological imagination.

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 4: Theoretical and Pedagogical Innovations in Historical Criminology

Abstract

Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth (1950 in German English translation 2003) re-presents the development of globalism. Globalism first occurred through European Imperialism where under the legitimacy of the Church European powers took possession of the ‘empty’ spaces of the world in the name of discovery; seizure of land, division and then productive use and trade. Discovery always occurred without the permission of the ‘discovered peoples’ and the discovered became known through the knowledges (the ‘sciences’) of the discoverer who thereby knew the discovered better than the discovered did themselves.
Europe retained its position as the power and knowledge centre, the Nomos (the understanding of right and legitimacy) of the world became a set of concrete situations (colonies/kingdoms etc individual situations of legal positivism) in relation to a Europe that determined the Jurisprudence. While Europe internally became more and more a civilised space, where the rule of law and norms of social organisation developed, outside, whatever took place was not judged by the same norms – instead it was that which was assumed necessary to deal with the ‘others’, the savages, inferior races, the degenerate.
Schmitt sought a new Nomos of the Earth, for him this lay in a return to the soil, to the relationship to the earth itself. Ironically this is central to the use of post-colonial indigenous perspectives. Schmitt fits contemporary post-colonial Aotearoa/New Zealand where Māori (people of the land), first treated as a savage race expected to die out, now are 15% of the population but 54% of the male prison population, where the imposed legal order is asked to re-accommodate Māori tikanga either as radial co-existence or abolition of the inherited.

Author

• Wayne Morrison, Queens Mary