No abstract

Recent appeals to decolonize criminology argue for a radical reorientation of the subject towards Global South relevant research agendas, theories and scholars. This paper begins by problematizing the current theoretical tendencies in Southern criminology’s view of coloniality and the vision for decolonization. First, Southern criminology has not directly engaged in investigating ‘empire’ in its current form; second, decolonization is viewed as primarily epistemological (transforming systems of knowledge production is seen as the central mode for decolonization); and, third, there is a tendency to reify Southern institutional responses to crime as preferable to Northern crime control. Launching from this critique, we argue that a successful Southern criminology should take seriously the continuing importance of structures of neo-colonialization: the Global system of accumulation founded on various matrixes of inequality, facilitating dispossession, appropriation and exploitation. We develop three criminological analyses of contemporary neo-colonization in Global South contexts: state-corporate ‘regimes of permission’, political economies of gender violence and racialization through criminalization regimes.

Since the late 1980s, following the transition to democratic rule in Latin America, criminal courts all over the continent have been going through a process of continuous reform. Reformers introduced an adversarial-based procedural system, arguing that it would guarantee due process and greater transparency and accountability. However, in recent years, the emphasis of this reformist narrative has changed from expanding defendants' rights towards improving the efficacy of the system. This paper explores how the original principles of transparency and accountability have been upheld in criminal courts in one of the first areas of jurisdiction to implement those changes: the Province of Buenos Aires. Based on an analysis of data from forty-five in-depth interviews with key informants and court observations, this paper explores how the reforms developed a managerial rationality in criminal courts that may undermine the due process in Latin American jurisdictions that have undergone similar democratic reform processes.

This paper scrutinises the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to sue host governments for any regulations that might directly or indirectly affect private investments. It gives investors rights over hoststates -and local populations -in international arbitration tribunals. The focus of this article is a critical examination of how the ISDS institutionalises a framework of exceptionality that is characteristic of neoliberal capitalism; one that centres upon the institutionalisation of subjecting public regulation to the rationality of the market. We argue that this privatised quasi-legal arena is incompatible with the rule of law, human rights and socially emancipatory practices. What this reveals is that the political and economic dynamics that mobilise and shape international investment law are characterised by capitalist class relations. The article concludes with some reflections upon the marketization of public regulation through the ISDS, where profitability and cost-reduction are prioritised over human and environmental rights.

Corporations’ profit-making objectives are a central force guiding development strategies in the Global South but contradictorily can be blamed for a range of social and environmental harms. This article brings a state-corporate crime lens to bear on the economic and political processes that shape Global South-located commodity production. It seeks to understand the functioning of neo-imperialist profiteering through elaborating the concept of regimes of extreme permission, described as modalities of ‘intense’ accumulation, defined by weaker or unstable forms of hegemony consolidation, illegal/illicit practices, state-sanctioned violence and various socio-environmental degradations. Through analyses of two regimes of extreme permission in the SE Asian context—Indonesian palm oil plantations and Export Processing Zones for garment production in the Greater Mekong Subregion—the paper describes the role of states and corporations in constructing the repressive socio-political space required for neo-colonial corporate accumulation. We contribute to ‘Southernizing’ criminology by re-articulating state-corporate crime theory within imperialist contexts. It also shows that neo-colonialism can be understood as the de-regulation of corporate accumulation.