Southern perspectives in criminology: an agenda

Several chapters that make up a large part of this book began life as papers presented at a ‘Southern Perspectives’ one-day research seminar at the University of Brighton in the early summer of 2019. The purpose of the day was to draw together several academic/theoretical research and network connections to explore a range of emerging concerns relating to ‘Southern Perspectives’ in criminology and existing scholarship on colonialism and the decolonization of the criminological imagination – or, in Agozino's terms – developing a critique of ‘imperialist reason’ (Agozino, 2003).

In pursuing this agenda, the distance we might have to travel from the familiar assumptions of academic criminology was, at this early stage, less than absolutely clear to us, but we were hopeful and keen to explore. In any event, Carrington et al's remarkably concise, but wonderfully coherent and challenging, introduction to Southern Criminology (2019) had recently appeared – preceded by the enormous, free-ranging Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (Carrington et al, 2018). These texts convinced us of the viability of criminology, a ‘rendezvous discipline’ like no other, as an appropriate vehicle for these developing enquiries. As such, the present volume builds on established and growing efforts to examine the ongoing legacies of colonialism on institutions of control and practices of ordering (Agozino, 2003; Aliverti et al, 2021). This is a book looking to facilitate dialogue between multiple critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, in particular Southern and postcolonial perspectives, through collaborations between activists, academics and intellectuals across the globe. Some years ago, Jock Young had likewise remarked that the ‘very liveliness of criminology and, at its best, its intellectual interest’ derived its place from the busy crossroads of social theory, concerned especially with order and regulation, political economy, and the state (Young, 2003: 97). Given our current concerns with postcolonial legacies, policing and violence, and the distinctive, frequently racialized, character of (in)security, (in)justice and (dis)order in Southern contexts, these seem like indispensable themes.