Doing criminology from the periphery: Crime and punishment in Asia

Abstract

In a recent article in Theoretical Criminology, Katja Franko Aas (2012: 12) reflects on the geopolitical imbalances and ‘situatedness’ of criminological theory and the pervasive North–South divide in knowledge production. Notwithstanding the growing awareness of global connectedness in transnational and comparative criminology and engagement with the legacies of imperialism and (post-)colonialism in recent years (see, for example, Agozino, 2003; Cunneen, 2011; Sheptycki and Wardak, 2005), criminology has remained essentially a discipline of the ‘North’. The marginalization of social experience and knowledge production of the Global South has meant that many important criminological problems in the South are not covered in conventional Anglo-American criminology texts. Critics of the North Atlantic epistemic hegemony have pointed to the ‘distorted’ claims of universality of social theories produced in the North (Keim, 2010: 169) and the misleading or counter-productive nature of its theoretical presumptions and crime control models when applied to southern contexts (Cain, 2000; Connell, 2006). Further, scholars working outside the metropolitan centres have struggled to break away from the established ethnocentric frameworks of knowledge production, disparities in research capacities and power relations. As Aas (2012: 15–16) puts it, it is high time that criminology develops ‘more democratic epistemologies ... as an analytic imperative and an opportunity for theoretical innovation’ and turns to the South as ‘a platform for theorizing the global from the periphery’. In responding to the rallying call to expand criminology’s geopolitical imagination and to ‘see from the peripheries’ (Aas, 2012: 11), this Special Issue takes East and SouthEast Asia as the point of departure and showcases criminological work undertaken in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Japan.