Introduction: Turning Criminology Upside Down

Abstract

This section introduces the reader to the key themes threaded through the text. We establish our principle argument: understanding the criminal justice and related systems in many parts of the globe requires a post-disciplinary approach informed by theories from outside mainstream criminology and sociology, including, but not restricted to: settler colonial and postcolonial theories; radical perspectives from the southern hemisphere on the colonial matrix of power and decoloniality; Indigenous knowledge systems; and, critics of modernist violence, principally Giorgio Agamben’s work on the “camp” and “inclusive exclusion”. We introduce postcolonial theory as centralising the “colonial matrix of power” and challenging universal regimes of truth. We position both post-disciplinary and postcolonial approaches as necessary for the task of decolonising criminology.