This article attempts an ambitious undertaking by scholars collaborating from far flung parts of the globe to redefine the geographic and conceptual limits of critical criminology. We attempt to scope, albeit briefly, the various contributions to criminology (not all of it critical) from Argentina, Asia, Brazil, Columbia and South Africa, in alphabetical order. Our aim is not to criticize the significant contributions to critical criminology by scholars from the Global North, but to southernize critical criminology-to extend its gaze and horizons beyond the North Atlantic world. The democratization, decolonization and globalization of knowledge is a profoundly important project in an unequal and divided world where knowledge systems have been dominated by Anglophone countries of the Global North (Ball, this issue;Connell, 2007). Southernizing fields of knowledge represents an important step in the journey toward cognitive justice as imagined by de Sousa Santos (2014). While we can make only a very small contribution from a selected number of countries from the Global South, it is our hope that others may be inspired to join the journey, fill in the gaps, and bridge global divides.

Hate crimes, it has been said, are 'message' crimes to which society needs to respond using the most powerful and unambiguous means of communication at its disposal, the criminal law. Using empirical data collected in the course of research conducted by the authors on racially motivated violence and harassment in North Staffordshire, this article sets out to interpret the messages about hate crime sent to perpetrators, and people from their local communities, by the creation, in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, of a new category of racially aggravated offences. To this end two possible anti-hate crime messages and three potential audiences are identified and evaluated in the light of data generated from biographical interviews with perpetrators and focus group discussions with other local people in and around the city of Stokeon-Trent. Our conclusion is that the supposedly clear deterrent and denunciatory or declaratory messages contained in the 1998 Act are either drowned out or distorted by other signals coming from successive 'New' Labour governments about crime, immigration, nationality and 'community cohesion', and by the highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways in which they are mediated and interpreted by their intended recipients.

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