Two of the most promising developments to emerge from the failed attempts to contain the spread of infectious disease outbreaks since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) a pandemic on 23 January 2020 are (i) an acceleration of the critique of neoliberalism and (ii) a reinvigoration of the state crime vocabulary. As Henry Giroux (2020) argued, the pandemic has exposed “the plague of neoliberalism” and revealed the need for a new language to make sense of the current crisis. In this article, I argue that the language of state crime has both the terminological and the conceptual capacity to inform such a sense-making endeavour and, relatedly, that the academic literature on state criminality can complement critiques of the global neoliberal order in the context of the failed governance of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This paper makes a call for a critical historical criminology of the antipodean and the Global South. It makes a preliminary argument for a critical historical criminology that is against method and in favour of political alliances with critical perspectives that can enrich historico‑criminological understandings in an antipodean and Southern context. In particular, this paper explores the potential for a politico-academic alliance between critical historical criminology and postcolonial studies, Southern theory and Indigenous research. Such politico-academic alliances reveal that critical historical criminology is best understood as a negation of both criminology and history and that historical criminology does not have to be understood as a new sub-discipline and academic specialism at the intersection of history and criminology. On the contrary, this paper argues that historical criminology can be approached as a critical attempt to ‘unthink the social sciences’ and to ‘de-discipline ourselves’.
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