Southern Criminology By Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg, John Scott, Máximo Sozzo and Reece Walters, just published! (Routledge, London and New York)

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. It is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice.

This book turns the origin stories of criminology upsidedown. It traces criminology’s orientalist  fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism.  It uncovers the colonial legacy of criminal justice,  best exemplified by the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples.   It analyses the ways in which discourses about punishment have simply assumed that forms of penality roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world. It  advances the case that although the major drivers of eco-crime and  global warming come from the Global North, their most harmful impacts are felt in the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes distinctive patterns of violence in the Global South.

Reviews

“A thought provoking book! Written by the leaders of Southern Criminology, it is a most important contribution that addresses the issue of North-South imbalance in the production of criminological knowledge. The book powerfully challenges the assumed universality of dominant criminology theories and explains how contemporary criminology knowledge has been highly limited by Western experiences.”

– Professor Jianhong Liu, Department of Sociology, University of Macau

“Southern Criminology takes the reader on a journey of critical imagination to offer a future landscape for the discipline of criminology. This journey is challenging and profound. The authors chart a route from the discipline’s past to the promise of a dawn for its future that anyone willing to travel with them will find intellectually valuable and hugely rewarding. Take a risk. Take this journey. You will not be disappointed.”

– Professor Sandra Walklate, Eleanor Rathbone Chair of Sociology, University of Liverpool and Editor in Chief of the British Journal of Criminology

“For most of its existence, criminology has been moulded by the intellectual perspectives and ideological reflexes of the global North—a region that contains only a fraction of the world’s population and only a fraction of its experience of violence and social harm. Southern Criminology promises to be a foundational document in a growing movement to bring the rest of the world into the centre of criminological dialogue and action.”

– Professor Elliott Currie, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California Irvine

“This book is an inspiring project of retrieval of wisdom bubbling up from marginality and domination in global structures of social relations. The ideas retrieved bridge global divides rather than essentialize ‘North’ or ‘South’. Dialogue across diverse divides helps build new intercultural and interscalar understandings in a pathbreaking volume.”

– Professor John Braithwaite, RegNet, ANU

“This book presents a convincing argument about the need to develop a Southern Criminology to overcome the monopolization of criminology by the Northern part of the world. It leaves us well informed on important issues, especially on the richness and pertinence of incorporating Southern perspectives into the Global understanding of crime and violence. Far from trying to discredit the knowledge produced by Northern Criminology, this book proves a simple fact: that we can learn from each other, and that knowledge can travel from Global South to North, South to South, East to West and vice versa.”

– Professor Elena Azaola, Mexican Criminologist, del Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, CIESAS