Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the
large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the
global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is
an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias.
This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed
a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case
studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology's long fascination
with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso's theory of atavism,
itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the
Global South; uncovering criminology's colonial legacy, perhaps best
exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler
societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in
which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on
Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the
Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the
harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more
significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the
coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South.
Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but
rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective
that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and
enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global
criminology in the twenty-first century.
