Decolonizing the Criminal Question: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems

Within the discipline of criminology and criminal justice, relatively little attention has been paid to the relationship between criminal law, punishment, and imperialism, or the contours and exercise of penal power in the Global South. Decolonizing the Criminal Question is the first work of its kind to comprehensively place colonialism and its legacies at the heart of criminological enquiry.

By examining the reverberations of colonial history and logics in the operation of penal power, this volume explores the uneasy relationship between criminal justice and colonialism, bringing relevance of these legacies in criminological enquiries to the forefront of the discussion. It invites and pursues a better understanding of the links between imperialism and colonialism on the one hand, and nationalism and globalization on the other, by exposing the imprints of these links on processes of marginalization, racialization, and exclusion that are central to contemporary criminal justice practices. Covering a range of jurisdictions and themes, Decolonizing the Criminal Question details how colonial and imperial domination relied on the internalization of hierarchies and identities ― for example, racial, geographical, and geopolitical ― of both the colonized and the colonizer, and shaped their subjectivity through imageries, discourses, and technologies.

Offering innovative, conceptual, and methodological approaches to the study of the criminal question, this work is an essential read for scholars not only focused on criminology and criminal justice, but also for scholars in law, anthropology, sociology, politics, history, and a range of other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.

Decolonizing the Criminal Question is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Ana Aliverti, Professor of Law, University of Warwick, UK,Henrique Carvalho, Reader in Law, University of Warwick, UK,Anastasia Chamberlen, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Warwick, UK,Máximo Sozzo, Professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology, Faculty of Social and Juridical Sciences, National University of Litoral, Argentina

Ana Aliverti is a Professor of Law at the School of Law, University of Warwick. She holds a D.Phil. in Law (Oxford, 2012), an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice (Distinction, Oxford, 2008), an MA in Sociology of Law (IISL, 2005) and a BA in Law (Honours, Buenos Aires, 2002). Her research explores questions of national identity and belonging in criminal justice, and of law, sovereignty and globalisation. She has led extensive empirical work in the UK's criminal justice and immigration systems. She is the author of Crimes of Mobility (Routledge, 2013) and Policing the Borders Within (OUP, 2021). She was co-awarded the British Society of Criminology Best Book Prize for 2014, and has received the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (BARSEA) (2015), the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law (2017), and the British Journal of Criminology's Radzinowicz Prize. She is co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and the Associate Director of Border Criminologies.

Henrique Carvalho's research interests lie in the areas of criminal law, criminalisation and punishment, and legal, social, political and cultural theory. He joined the University of Warwick in September 2015, having previously worked as a Lecturer in Law at City, University of London, a Visiting Lecturer at King's College London and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the London School of Economics.

Anastasia Chamberlen's research interests lie in the areas of theoretical criminology, the sociology of punishment and prisons, feminist theory and theoretical debates in the study of emotions, embodiment and the arts in criminal justice. Having previously worked as a lecturer in criminology at Birkbeck, University of London, she joined Warwick's Sociology Department in 2016 as Associate Professor of Sociology.

Over the last 25 years Máximo Sozzo has completed research in different areas of contemporary criminology, always with a focus on Latin America and Argentina. He is now working on prisons and power, historical transformations of punishment, the mechanisms of sentencing without trial, and the travels of ideas about the criminal question across the Global North and South.