The decolonization of criminology and cultural prejudice: dialogues between the global north and the global south

Abstract

If we are to make some advances in international criminology, we need to face the fact that, historically, criminological knowledge has often been used as a support of colonial and authoritarian rule and acknowledge that also today international criminologists operate by and large in a culturally ill-informed vacuum in which a ‘universal’ validity of Western theories is implicitly taken for granted. Starting from Edward Said’s famous critique of the ‘orientalism’ of Western academics, Achille Mbembe’s notion of ‘black reason’ and the decolonial perspectives of Quijano, Mignolo, Dussel and others, we will investigate how bottom-up ethnographies, cultural anthropological debates on cultural ‘landscapes’ and a peripheral point of view could help to decolonise criminology. In conclusion, it is argued that a culturally informed international criminology is not based on humanitarian do-gooderism or shame over a colonial past, but that it is fundamental if we are to understand the world around us and indeed the ‘glocal’ questions we are confronted with.