Value, logistics and violence: Contemporizing imperialism for a critical Southern criminology

Abstract

This article develops both a critique of the Southern criminology project but also argues that a continued focus on the global organization of the economy should sit central in anti‐imperialist social science. Southern criminology, reflective of other trends in ‘decolonization’, has not placed a sustained critique of domination and exploitation central, viewing decolonization as possible without a radical upending of the global economy. This paper asserts that understanding imperialism through a materialist lens uncovers the structural forces at play in reshaping globally evolving and expansive economic infrastructures which generate and distribute surplus value. To illustrate the importance of this point for anti‐imperialist criminology, we engage with critical logistics studies which successfully shows how transnational projections of power reshape and sustain the global system of production and consumption, with which comes a series of harms and dispossessions. The variegated and fractured social orders which the revolution in circulation have required rearticulating policing, security and criminalization across multiple horizons and locations of social life. In terms of developing critical approaches to Southern criminology, a focus on critical logistics studies offers, by way of example, the possibility of grasping concrete legal orders, criminalization, and oppression central in producing the current regime of neo‐colonial circulation.