Abstract
What does it mean to “do” southern criminology? What does this entail and what demands should it place on us as criminologists ethically and methodologically? This article addresses such questions through a form dialogue between the Global North and the Global South. At the center of this dialogue is a set of questions about ethical conduct in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding in human relations. These develop into a conversation that engages South Asian scholars working at the forefront of critical social science, history and theory with a foundational text of European hermeneuticist theory and practice, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, published in 1960. Out of this exercise in communication across culture, histories and knowledge practices emerges a new kind of dialogue and a new way of thinking about ethical practice in criminology. To give such abstractions a concrete reference point, the article illustrates their possibilities and tensions through a case study of penal reform and the question of whether so-called “failed” Northern penal methods—like the prison—should be exported to the Global South. The article thus works dialogically back and forth through these scholars’ accounts of ethical conduct, research practice, the weight of history, and the work of theory with a very concrete and common criminological context in sight. The result is what might be understood as a norm of ethical engagement and an epistemology of dialogue.
Highlights
This article raises questions about how Northern or Global North-oriented criminologists might think about the Global South and, in their work, try to join in finding just futures there
The article moves beyond prevailing visions of ethics in Southern and postcolonial criminology by distinguishing political claims that are often framed as ethical injunctions—such as that we should notimpose colonial logics upon peoples and communities of the Global South—from an individuallevel and formal ethical account of conduct that is grounded in Kantian morality’s demand for all people(s) to be treated as fully human
What sort of ethical and methodological issues arise in southern criminology? What are the implications for knowledge production and for practice—for truth and method—as Northern or North-oriented criminologists look or to the Global South or, as criminologists of the Global South seek to negotiate long-standing structural inequalities and hierarchies of power within societies of the Global South? An adequate answer to these questions might occupy this nascent endeavor for some years to come
Summary
This article raises questions about how Northern or Global North-oriented criminologists might think about the Global South and, in their work, try to join in finding just futures there. To claim that theory formed on the anvil of Northern experience, and perhaps even reinforced by “tests” of “fit” in the odd far flung place, reveals a general truth that Southerners should apply to themselves and their world establishes a relationship of domination (Gadamer) or charity (Guru) by dint of its character.
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