Decolonialising justice: A realist critique

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 4: Colonialism and Empire in Historical Criminology

Abstract

While acknowledging the importance of critically interrogating Western colonialism and its judicial legacies, this paper challenges the integrity of research produced under the banner of decolonial theory. It argues that decolonial scholarship, having abandoned the Western sceptical tradition of knowledge production, replaces open-ended empirical inquiry with a predetermined moral framework—one in which the West is invariably culpable, and the Global South is cast as a passive victim. This reductive approach not only distorts the complexities of crime and justice but also overstates the causal impact of colonial legacies while absolving contemporary perpetrators of violence in the Global South of agency and responsibility. By prioritising ideological commitments over rigorous analysis, decolonial critique risks collapsing historical complexity into dogma rather than advancing a genuine science of crime.

Author

• Simon Hallsworth, Universty of Suffolk