Abstract
Indigenous peoples, their cultures and territories, have been subjected to continuous victimisation, plunder and genocide throughout history—or at least ‘history’ as created by and written from the North. Since contact with colonisers, these many different peoples have suffered legal and illegal forms of direct, structural and symbolic violence. Meanwhile, criminology—the discipline concerned with studying instances of criminality, harm and victimisation—has largely remained untouched by or indifferent to serious crimes and systematic attacks that have increased mortality, denied rights and destroyed traditional ways of life. In this article, we first present a bibliographical analysis of relevant content in leading criminology journals. We then suggest a conceptual and theoretical basis for enhancing an ethical and non-colonial engagement with this underdeveloped field of work. We conclude, however, that to counter the under-representation of Indigenous explorations and contributors in criminology, a broader transformation of the discipline will be necessary.
Highlights
Criminology has expanded through processes of identifying and reacting to its gaps, blind spots, and biases
A ‘dearth’ of relevant research does not mean a complete absence, and some notable and recent contributions to the literature on Indigenous matters include the longstanding efforts of scholars like Tauri, Cunneen and others (Cunneen and Tauri 2017; Tauri 1999; Tauri and Morris 1997), as well as the founding of the International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy (IJCJSD), which between its launch in 2012 to our cut-off date in 2019, has published 15 articles that deal substantially with Indigenous issues, meaning that this journal alone has published 10% of all the articles we found in our sample of 24 academic outlets
We have argued that a criminology that acknowledges past ‘gaps, blind spots, and biases’, as we put it in the Introduction, is well placed to build upon this recognition and, as has occurred in addressing other omissions, can be strengthened and enriched in various ways
Summary
Criminology has expanded through processes of identifying and reacting to its gaps, blind spots, and biases. From the pioneering embrace of a human rights and harm perspective to counter the dominance of a legalistic view (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970), to the development of a feminist criminology to counter the dominance of a male view (Smart 1977), to the inception of a global criminology to surpass methodological nationalism (Aas 2007), to proposals for a green criminology to study harm and crime beyond the traditional focus on built environments (Lynch 1990; South 1998), criminologists have sought to fill gaps that seem ‘obvious’ once addressed but which have been underdeveloped in terms of knowledge and theoretical, conceptual and empirical innovations Such spaces of absence are created by both the orientation of professional training around the topics that are said to ‘matter’ (Goyes 2019; Kuhn 1962), as well as the social everyday frameworks within which most criminologists live their lives (Aas 2012). We conclude with some reflections on why the flourishing of any initiatives to build an Indigenous criminology will depend on some reorientation within the global politics of criminological research
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