How southern is Southern criminology in Latin America?

Abstract

Criminological research published in Latin America has received limited attention in global debates. Inspired by the Southern criminology project, in this article I aim to fill this gap by describing the main features of articles published in Latin America and exploring to what extent these publications reflect the core elements posited by Southern criminologists. To this end, I propose a novel operationalization of Southern criminology coding topics and theoretical frameworks using a dataset I compiled with articles published in 2020 in Latin America (N = 230). The results show that most of the articles are non-empirical and almost half of them are Southern articles. Also, the findings suggest that when articles adopt a Southern theoretical framework, almost all of them are non-empirical. I conclude by discussing the results within the larger context of Latin American academia, arguing for the need to expand empirical approaches to achieve the goals of Southern criminology.