Indigenous Worlds and Criminological Exclusion: A Call to Reorientate the Criminological Compass

Abstract

Indigenous peoples, their cultures and territories, have been subjected to continuous victimisation, plunder and genocide throughout history—or at least ‘history’ as created by and written from the North. Since contact with colonisers, these many different peoples have suffered legal and illegal forms of direct, structural and symbolic violence. Meanwhile, criminology—the discipline concerned with studying instances of criminality, harm and victimisation—has largely remained untouched by or indifferent to serious crimes and systematic attacks that have increased mortality, denied rights and destroyed traditional ways of life. In this article, we first present a bibliographical analysis of relevant content in leading criminology journals. We then suggest a conceptual and theoretical basis for enhancing an ethical and non-colonial engagement with this underdeveloped field of work. We conclude, however, that to counter the under-representation of Indigenous explorations and contributors in criminology, a broader transformation of the discipline will be necessary.

‘An incorporeal disease’: COVID-19, social trauma and health injustice in four Colombian Indigenous communities

“…The communities did not participate in the process of analysis, mainly due to distance and communication barriers. The team drafted the articles, including the Indigenous peer researchers as co-authors, first, to highlight their key role in the process of knowledge production (data gathering, coding and text drafting); and second, to confront the generalised academic practice of writing about Indigenous issues and, at best, speaking on behalf of Indigenous peoples but in general not involving and including Indigenous co-researchers (Goyes & South, 2021).…”

Green Criminology in the Niger Delta of Nigeria: Why African Women’s Voices Matter

“…Green criminology has entered debates about marginalisation in studies conducted by scholars such as South (1998aSouth ( , 1998b, South and White (2014), White and Heckenberg (2014), Lynch (2006), Lynch, Fegadel and Long (2021), and Goyes (2018Goyes ( , 2019Goyes ( , 2021. Tracing the evolution of green criminology, South (2014a: 6) makes a case for 'the enhancement of environmental consciousness in criminology and the development of a green perspective'.…”

“…Ecocide encompasses human-caused environmental damage and intentional and unintentional ecological degradation (Higgins, Short and South 2013: 263), such as has occurred in the Nigerian Niger Delta. I will consider environmental issues in the Delta adopting a criminology lens, particularly drawing upon other work exploring 'green criminological dialogues' (see Goyes 2018Goyes , 2019Goyes , 2021Lynch, Fegadel and Long 2021;Sollund and Wyatt 2022;South , 2009South , 2014aSouth , 2014bSouth , 2021White 2003;White and Heckenberg 2014).…”

Penality at the Periphery: Deficits, Absences, and Negation

“…These demands for a cosmopolitan academic culture are not by themselves entirely new (Hall, 2007; Said, 2003), but there is undoubtedly a new popular impetus now driving this critique. Within criminology, there is now a chorus of voices calling on us to decenter the West and the Global North and “reorient the criminological compass” so as to direct us more toward the marginalized peoples and nations who are systematically overlooked by the criminological gaze (Goyes & South, 2021; see also Aas, 2012; Carrington et al, 2016, 2019; Fraser, 2013; Lee & Laidler, 2013; Moosavi, 2019). For criminology to have an epistemological evolution, it is the narrowness of our canon that must be challenged and upended.…”