This is an extract from my chapter “Abolition and (De)colonisation Cutting the Criminal Question’s Gordian Knot” recently published in the book Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems, edited by Ana Aliverti, Henrique Carvalho, Anastasia Chamberlen and Máximo Sozzo. The whole book, including my chapter, is available as an open access pdf here.

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A decolonised criminal question? A decolonised criminology? 

… decolonization is always a violent phenomenon

Franz Fanon, 1967: 27

Decolonisation can mean many things to different people, these range from those who advocate a performative decolonisation involving only minor, token changes, to those who argue for a revolutionary decolonisation requiring fundamental change to the whole social structure. My own understanding is that, firstly, decolonisation requires recognising the harms colonialism caused and continues to cause. Secondly, it entails taking positive steps to repair this damage, and, thirdly, it necessitates the development of new ways of doing things that do not replicate colonialism. Much of what is presented as decolonisation focuses on recognising colonialism’s historic impact (Blagg and Anthony, 2019; Cunneen and Tauri, 2016). Whilst this is important, limiting the scope of decolonisation to a historical exercise, can compromise attempts to undo the social structures perpetuating the rationales and legacies of colonialism; the ways of thinking and economic inequalities colonialism created. Such approaches are vulnerable to being absorbed into institutions where, inevitably, they become watered down (Dhillon, 2021). As Franz Fanon (1967: 28) has argued, decolonisation is, ‘the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature.’ It cannot, through compromises or accommodations, be mainstreamed within fundamentally colonial institutions. It has been defined by Joel Modiri as:

an insatiable reparatory demand, an insurrectionary utterance, that always exceeds the temporality and scene of its enunciation. It entails nothing less than an endless fracturing of the world colonialism created. 

cited by Adebisi, 2019

It requires action that achieves  real change, ultimately leading to the dismantling of the world created by colonialism (Adebisi, 2019). It is about returning what was stolen: sovereignty, land and power (Tuck and Yang, 2012). It is not a process that involves adding something – books to a reading list – but it is, as Franz Fanon (1967: 27) made clear, ‘always a violent phenomenon’. Critiques of penal law and criminology from  a colonial perspective are not new. Writing in 1955 Franz Fanon (2018: 416) concluded that attempts to achieve ‘a criminological understanding’ in the context of colonial North Africa ‘proves impossible’. Stan Cohen (1982) critiqued the transfer of Western crime control techniques to ‘Third World’ countries highlighting the dangers Western criminology presented to African postcolonial societies. The need for a postcolonial criminology was identified by Chris Cunneen (1999: 125) who argued it was ‘required to theorise … (criminology’s) disciplinary foundations within a colonial project which involved systematic and gross abuse of human rights.’ Biko Agozino (2003: 228) identified that ‘(c)riminology was developed primarily as a tool for imperialist domination’. In response to these critiques a number of new strands of the discipline have been proposed, including: Black criminology (Russell, 1992; see also the contributions of Unnever et al, 2019); postcolonial criminology (Cunneen, 1999); counter-colonial criminology (Agozino, 2003); Pan-African criminology (Agozino, 2004); Asian criminology (Liu, 2009); Indigenous criminology (Cunneen and Tauri, 2016); Southern criminology (Carrington et al, 2016); and a decolonised criminology (Agozino, 2018; and from a different perspective, Blagg and Anthony, 2019). A detailed review of these new criminological paradigms, and the literature from which they have emerged, is beyond the scope of this chapter; however, what they all – irrespective of their critique of their parent discipline – have in common is a focus on the potential of postcolonial and decolonial interventions to ‘develop and enrich criminology’ (Cunneen, 2011: 263). The editors of this collection have referred to ‘the difficult ongoing task of decolonising criminology (Aliverti et al, 2021: 299) whilst the authors of Indigenous Criminology have argued for ‘the possibilities of a decolonised postcolonial relationship between criminal justice institutions and Indigenous communities’ (Cunneen and Tauri, 2016: 160). For  Kerry Carrington, Russell Hogg and Maximo Sozzo (2016: 1) their proposed southern criminology is not intended ‘to dismiss the conceptual and empirical advances in criminology, but to more usefully de-colonize and democratize the toolbox of available criminological concepts, theories and methods.’ This literature has in common both a harsh critique of contemporary criminology, based on its colonial history, and a belief in the urgent need to engage in a process of decolonising both the discipline and the wider criminal question. However, these scholars have tended to assume that it is possible to identify colonial influences and legacies within both criminology and criminal justice policies, practices and institutions, and somehow, remove these to produce  a decolonised criminology and criminal question. Although this approach does recognise the harms of colonialism, this chapter argues, through their continued commitment to both criminology and answering the criminal question, such approaches fail to develop new ways of doing things, and leaves them at risk of replicating colonialism.

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The next part of the essay can be read here: Colonialism, justice and the concept of crime

If you want to check out my sources please see the essay’s reference list