Criminology for a post-liberal global order

• In Event: Crime, Science and Politics WG Panel 3: Legitimacy and Transformation in Global Criminal Justice

Abstract

Criminology is a discipline fundamentally concerned with order-making, yet it has not comprehensively theorized nor problematized the global order itself. Instead, the liberal global order shaped by Western hegemony has been taken for granted and remains an implicit premise in much criminological scholarship. This paper asks: what happens to criminological theory when the liberal global order collapses? The paper starts by reviewing how the Western-dominated liberal order has been implicit in criminological theory, and points out problems and misunderstandings stemming from the lack of criminological engagement with geopolitics and the empirical reality of global power relations. We then turn to discuss how recent developments across the world – including the wars in Ukraine and Palestine; US’ trade war with China, the re-election of Donald Trump and dismantling of US hegemony; and anticolonial uprisings across Africa – force us to rethink criminological theory. First, we discuss what happens to central epistemologies in criminology now that liberal international institutions are in decline, including the upsetting of concepts like “rule of law”, “human rights” and “democracy”. Here, positions have become inverted: liberal values that were before tools of Western liberal imperialism, are now being championed by Global South countries who attempt to bring the West to account for its crimes. Second, we discuss the criminological implications of the fragmentation into global multipolarity and regional power centra/alternative orders, with an increasing room for power, agency and interchange of the Global South and East, yet in a way that is much more uncomfortable than what Southern criminologists wanted. Thus, we pay attention to connections and disconnections between national and international order, arguing that the global order cannot remain irrelevant to criminologists as its change has profound consequences also for domestic crime policy and criminal justice systems around the world.

Authors

• Eva Magdalena Stambøl, University of Oslo

• Kjersti Lohne, University of Oslo