Abstract
Southern criminology has been recognized as a leading theoretical development for attempting to overcome the perpetuation of colonial power relations reflected in the unequal flow of knowledge between the Global North and Global South. Critics, however, have pointed out that Southern criminology runs the risk of recreating epistemicide and colonial power structures by reproducing colonial epistemology and by being unable to disentangle itself from the hegemony of Western modern thought. This article introduces the approach of the “decolonial option,” which suggests that all our contemporary ways of being, interacting, knowing, perceiving, sensing, and understanding are fundamentally shaped by coloniality—long-standing patterns of power that emerged because of colonialism and that are still at play (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Quijano 1992). The “decolonial option” seeks ways of knowing and being that heal, resist, and transform these deeply harmful and embedded patterns of power. Drawing on the “decolonial option,” this article aims to provide a constructive critique of Southern criminology by facilitating a better understanding of “coloniality” and offering an epistemological shift that is necessary to move toward global and cognitive justice. The rupture and paradigm shift in criminological knowledge production offered by the “decolonial option” dismantles criminology’s Western universalist narratives and its logic of separation that lie in modernity. By doing so, it provides a different understanding of modernity that looks behind its universalizing narratives and designs (e.g., development, progress, salvation) to expose “coloniality”—modernity’s dark, destructive side. While the “decolonial option” does not entail a universalizing mission, it is an option—one of the many paths that one can select to undertake decolonial work—and this article argues that if Southern criminology were to incorporate the decolonial epistemological and conceptual framework, it could better insulate itself from certain consequences of “coloniality” that it risks embodying.
Highlights
Critics of criminology have pointed to the discipline’s amnesia, blindness to and complicity in colonialism and its enduring, pervasive and harmful legacies (Agozino 2003; Cunneen and Tauri 2016; Goyes and South 2017; Moosavi 2018)
The strand, that has gained most traction of this group has been the development of Southern criminology in recent years (Carrington et al 2016,2018b; Carrington and Hogg 2017)
While the “decolonial option” does not entail a universalizing mission, it is an option—one of the many paths that one can pursue to undertake decolonial work, and this article argues that if Southern criminology were to incorporate the decolonial epistemology and conceptual framework, it could better insulate itself from certain consequences of “coloniality” that it risks embodying
Summary
Critics of criminology have pointed to the discipline’s amnesia, blindness to and complicity in colonialism and its enduring, pervasive and harmful legacies (Agozino 2003; Cunneen and Tauri 2016; Goyes and South 2017; Moosavi 2018). Among the colonial legacies perpetuated by criminology has been its active engagement in silencing and downplaying non-Western knowledges (Agozino 2003; Carrington et al 2016; Kitossa 2012) This is troublesome because it maintains the intellectual violence of colonialism through the discrimination and denial of any alternative ways of thinking, knowing, and being in the world. The growing awareness of the discipline’s complicity in such harms has resulted in the emergence of various strands within criminology over the past decades, all of which endeavor to decolonize the discipline from its Westerncentrism These include Asian (Liu 2009), counter-colonial (Agozino 2003, 2004), and Indigenous criminologies (Cunneen and Tauri 2016), as well as the criminology of liberation (Aniyar de Castro 1985,1987), marginal realism (Zaffaroni 1988), and post-colonial (Cunneen 2001) and transnational (Bowling 2011) criminologies. The strand, that has gained most traction of this group has been the development of Southern criminology in recent years (Carrington et al 2016,2018b; Carrington and Hogg 2017)
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