The
idea for the title of this presentation came from a discussion I had in early
2019 with a prominent Australian Aboriginal scholar regarding the Criminology
of the Global South (from here-on-in Southern Criminology), during which he described
engaging with material produced by Australian members of this ‘new’
criminological movement, as akin to drinking ‘old wine out of a dirty
bottle’. The old wine refers to the
rehashed Eurocentric theories and focus of the new criminology, while the dirty
bottle referred to the fact that Southern Criminology arose from the same
bastion of white privilege, the neo-liberal university, as had most of the schools
of criminology that have existed previously.
According
to advocates, Southern Criminology is the latest criminological project seeking
to ‘decolonise’ the discipline, removing it from its ‘Northern’, Eurocentric
foundations and theoretical bias.
The
esteemed British scholar Matthews, described Southern Criminology as “probably
the most significant theoretical development in the recent period”, and just
recently Fonseca described the movement as “a gush of fresh air in the debate
involving studies of crime, crime control and punishment” (quoted in Moosava,
2019).
I agree
with the gush of air part of that last quote, but I not as yet convinced of its
freshness, given the conduct of some of its Australian adherents towards
Indigenous scholars and scholarship over the past decade, and the lack of
meaningful engagement with our work and with Indigenous peoples in general.
Unlike Leon
Moosavi’s paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2019, I will
not be offering a ‘friendly critique’ of this supposedly ‘new’ criminological
movement. If you’ve read Moosavi’s paper
you will recall that he chose to offer a friendly critique Southern Criminology
because he wanted to enhance the project due in part, to a belief that
it has a solidarity with the principles of decolonising criminology rather than
scepticism about its necessity or potential worth to the cause of social (and
especially to Indigenous) justice. Well right now I am sceptical not so much of
the intent of Southern Criminologists, because thus far they are saying
pretty much all the right things - racism bad, inequality bad, free us from the
shackles of ‘Northern’ theory, ‘decolonise the discipline’, and speak for the
disaffected - etc, etc. However, demonstrating
support for decolonisation required much more than a few statements included in
an article here or there, or collected edition/handbook. We, and by that I mean Indigenous peoples,
have heard it all before, so we tend to judge those who claim to be our ‘allies’
on their actual conduct, or, as this is an academic exercise, on the content of
their research (and their conduct during and after it), what they say about us,
who they have invited to speak about us, and if they are engaging respectfully
and meaningfully with us.
The
theorist who appears to have greatly influenced the idea for a Southern
Criminology is Raewyn Connell, author of that well-known work Southern Theory
(2007). In that work Connell advanced
the argument for the ‘South’ to create its own body of theory and
knowledge. Her reasoning for offering
this proposition: because of the orientalist attitude that pervades the social
sciences that views academic scholarship and knowledge emanating from the South
as of poor quality and not worth consideration.
As an
Indigenous person, and researcher, I do not entirely disagree with Connell’s assessment
of the social sciences. In my experience this attitude is pervasive within the
discipline of criminology; for example when a scholar like Don Weatherburn write
as recently as 2014, that there is nothing for us to learn from Indigenous
knowledge about the causes of crime, because all we need to know we can get
from western science (a not uncommon sentiment amongst Australian criminologists
in my experience), then Connell is clearly onto something. But she, just like many of the scholars involved
in Southern Criminology in my part of the world, are talking about a situation and
an issue that we Indigenous people have long known about, have been
researching, and actively seeking to address.
One must wonder to what extent Southern Criminology is yet another
example of a bunch of (predominantly white) criminologists turning up extremely
late to our party…. largely uninvited.
The idea
that Australian criminology is part of the periphery – a central platform of
the rationale for Southern Criminology - greatly amuses me. Why?
Because of the long and ongoing history of bigotry within Australian
Criminology and the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes towards Indigenous
people and our knowledge. I’ll return to
this idea of Australian criminology as some backward, ignored, lonely bunch,
looking with longing to the Great North just to be recognised, like some teenager
at the school dance hoping someone, anyone, will ask him or her to dance, a
little later.
So, let
us briefly discuss this project, this Southern Criminology and in so doing I am
going to skim briefly and broadly over the main arguments (for its existence),
etc, for a detailed understanding read the extant literature:
It starts
with the observation that criminological theories and concepts have largely
been produced in ‘the West’, meaning Europe, the North America. It is also assumed that the ‘knowledge of the
North’ can be readily transported to the periphery, and that this knowledge
will be relevant anywhere (Moosavi, 2019), whether psycho-therapeutic programs or
policing tactics, or entire prison regimes, as in the case of New Zealand’s
importation the Integrated Offender Management system from Canada in the early
2000’s.
Let me
just pause here for a moment because I need to say something about this
portrayal of the ‘North’. As an
Indigenous scholar I need to say that when we hear or read the term criminology
of North American and Western Europe, the moment it hits our brain it is
translated into White Criminology: criminology by and for white people who then
do us poor natives a huge favour by offering us their gift of criminological
knowledge to fix crime problems generated mostly from the colonising behaviour
of their ancestors, or indeed themselves, if my experience of Australian
criminologists is anything to go by.
Moosava
(2019) also reports that Southern criminologists are motivated by the need to challenge
the largely one directional nature of knowledge flow (North to South) in order
to attain a more rounded criminological knowledge of crime and social harm. In this regard, much of what I have read thus
far from the Australasian practitioners of Southern Criminology leads me to
believe that what they are doing or intend to do is privilege the knowledge and
experiences of marginalised communities.
Any
attempt by members of Southern Criminology to prioritise the experiences of the
marginalised, if this principle were to result in concrete action on their part,
would indeed be welcomed by Indigenous communities. But of course, some of us are already doing
just that. And so to presage one of my
critiques of Southern Criminology - at least the Australian variant - nothing
I’ve read so far about their motivations or the core focus of their work is in
fact new, as I stated previously, Indigenous scholars have been doing it, and
not just saying it, for decades.
I agree
with Moosava’s point that so far Southern criminologists have not offered
enough reflection on whether the decolonisation of criminology is even possible
given the discipline’s Western origins, and its long and continuing parasitic
relationship with the state. The
difficulty of that disentanglement from the colonialist and paternalistic
mindset of criminology I will highlight with a couple of examples below.
Secondly,
I also agree with Moosava’s contention that the Australian branch of Southern
Criminology is highly Eurocentic in terms of theory and personnel. He rightly points out that in the Palgrave Handbook
of Criminology and the Global South released in 2018, almost half of the 79
contributors are based in Australian institutions, and the vast majority were
white. This is reflective of the way in
which Southern Criminology is dominated by Australian criminologists to such an
extent that Moosava writes that it may be more accurate to describe it as
‘Australian Criminology’.
At this
point Southern Criminology is not representative of the disaffected communities
who truly represent the South, such as the Indigenous peoples residing in
settler-colonial jurisdictions. For this reason, its claims to be a
decolonising project are groundless, unless of course they mean they are
decolonising themselves, in which case we wish them all the best.
This
brings us to the inevitable question: how far ‘South’ do you need to be, to be
able to truly, accurately call yourself a ‘Southern Criminology’; how
disaffected, ignored or marginalised?
Well, I put it to you that I needs to be a lot further south than the
comfortable, privileged position of academics in the wealthy academic
institutions of Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.
Right
now, I am extremely pessimistic about Southern Criminology, especially the
leadership of its Australian branch, can engage with our experiences in a
meaningful way. For example, comments by
one of the founders of Southern Criminology during a keynote speech at a
recent, major criminology conference, draw attention to the continued
prevalence of ‘old school’ attitudes towards Indigenous scholarship within the
‘movement’. During question time they
were asked what made this ‘new criminology’ different from others that seek to
decolonise the discipline, such as post-colonial criminology, peacemaker criminology,
counter-colonial and Indigenous criminology’s, to which they answered: ‘these criminology’s
romanticise the other’, meaning they mythologise our old ways of doing justice
and misrepresent the causes of Indigenous offending. As I have said in an earlier blog, this
portrayal of ‘our criminology’ does not reflect the research and publications
we have produced about Indigenous peoples and crime. How is this attitude any different from Don
Weatherburn’s ignorant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge? I put it to you all that it is not.
I want to
finish on one last point: in a 2016 article, Carrington et al, all leaders
in the development of Southern Criminology, stated that “[t]o be clear… our
purpose is not to add to the growing catalogue of new criminology’s...
[Southern Criminology] seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more
inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the
global North... [It] seeks to work with and complement—to Southernize—other
established and emerging fields in criminology: feminist, green, postcolonial,
queer, rural, cultural and Asian. (2016: 11; emphasis mine). The wording is unfortunately, because it
leads one to ask, are they seeking to Southernise, or Colonise these other criminology’s? It also gives the impression that something
vital is missing from them, without clarifying exactly what ‘it’ is, and what
they offer that is better. And so, when
Southern Criminologists call for ‘the periphery to invade the centre’ (Brown
2018: 96), some may recoil at what they might feel is imperialist language. Again, I ask are they trying to decolonise or
colonise?
Ok, so,
how do we explain the strange conduct of some of the Australian
contingent? I think that Leon Moosavi,
in his article from 2019, hits the nail on the head when he wrote that one of
the most urgent matters for Southern Criminology to address is whether
Australia should be considered as part of the Global South. Mark Brown (2018: 93) has also identified
this as a concern, stating that ‘Southern criminology faces its own existential
question: what makes you Southern?’ This
question divides opinion amongst proponents of Southern criminology. Some
believe that Australia is one of the ‘selected enclaves of the symbolic north
located south of the equator’ (Donnermeyer 2017: 128), whereas others
emulate Raewyn Connell’s view that Australia is marginalized in similar ways to
other Global South countries (Connell 2007: 212).
Australian
scholarship may often be ignored by those in the United States and the United
Kingdom, and Australia’s geographic location may make it harder for Australian
scholars to participate in international academic events, but Australia is
still a country that is developed, wealthy, stable, autonomous and privileged,
meaning that suggesting that Australia is part of the Global South is
problematic. At best, Australia may be part of the ‘semiperiphery’ (Medina
2011), but it still does not share the same hardship as the Asian, African and
Latin American countries that are typically considered as part of the Global
South, which is noteworthy because it has been suggested that a key component
of ‘epistemologies of the South’ is that they comprise ‘knowledge born in
struggle’ (Santos 2014: x).
The idea
that Australian criminology is isolated from its Northern counterparts is
nonsense. Overall, their knowledge is
not borne of struggle as Santos contends is a key marker of Southern
Criminology, unless you define ‘struggle’ as receiving a lukewarm coffee from a
café on the way to work. If you want to
see knowledge borne of struggle then go talk to Indigenous and African American
scholars and we’ll tell you about our experiences of dealing with racists in
the academy, of having our knowledge denigrated, our cultural practices and
languages incorporated into departmental and institutional strategic plans
(without meaningful funding attached); our people used as fodder as members of
the academy work to credentilise themselves to move up in seniority.
The truth
is we are already ‘Southern’ and we don’t need a bunch of white criminologists
to show us what is required to decolonise the discipline; we’ve been doing it
for a lot longer than this latest criminological fad was conceived. Therefore, I do not advocate for the
decolonisation of criminology; instead I call for the formulation of our own social
justice-oriented discipline. Why? Because I believe our energy is best directed
at the needs of our own communities, rather than wasting it on showing white academics
how to behave more ethically. In the
end, it is not our job as Indigenous scholars to fix the problems of
whitecentric criminology – let’s leave them to ‘southernise’ themselves.
References
Brown,
M (2018) Southern Criminology in the Post-colony: More than a ‘Derivative
Discourse?, in K. Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott and M. Sozzo (Eds.),
The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan: 83-104.
Carrington,
K; Sozzo, M and Hogg, R (2016) Southern Criminology, British Journal of
Criminology, 56: 1–20.
Connell,
R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Donnermeyer,
J (2017) The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology, International Journal
for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6: 118–32.
Medina,
J (2011) Doing Criminology in the ‘Semi-Periphery’ and the ‘Periphery’, in C. Smith,
S. Zhang and R. Barberet (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of International
Criminology. New York: Routledge: 13-23.
Moosavi,
L (2019) A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’,
British Journal of Criminology, 59: 257-275.
Santos,
B (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers.
Weatherburn,
D (2014) Arresting Incarceration: Pathways Out of Indigenous Imprisonment.
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.
