Decolonizing Southern Criminology: What Can the “Decolonial Option” Tell Us About Challenging the Modern/Colonial Foundations of Criminology?

Abstract

AbstractSouthern criminology has been recognized as a leading theoretical development for attempting to overcome the perpetuation of colonial power relations reflected in the unequal flow of knowledge between the Global North and Global South. Critics, however, have pointed out that Southern criminology runs the risk of recreating epistemicide and colonial power structures by reproducing colonial epistemology and by being unable to disentangle itself from the hegemony of Western modern thought. This article introduces the approach of the “decolonial option,” which suggests that all our contemporary ways of being, interacting, knowing, perceiving, sensing, and understanding are fundamentally shaped by coloniality—long-standing patterns of power that emerged because of colonialism and that are still at play (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Quijano 1992). The “decolonial option” seeks ways of knowing and being that heal, resist, and transform these deeply harmful and embedded patterns of power. Drawing on the “decolonial option,” this article aims to provide a constructive critique of Southern criminology by facilitating a better understanding of “coloniality” and offering an epistemological shift that is necessary to move toward global and cognitive justice. The rupture and paradigm shift in criminological knowledge production offered by the “decolonial option” dismantles criminology’s Western universalist narratives and its logic of separation that lie in modernity. By doing so, it provides a different understanding of modernity that looks behind its universalizing narratives and designs (e.g., development, progress, salvation) to expose “coloniality”—modernity’s dark, destructive side. While the “decolonial option” does not entail a universalizing mission, it is an option—one of the many paths that one can select to undertake decolonial work—and this article argues that if Southern criminology were to incorporate the decolonial epistemological and conceptual framework, it could better insulate itself from certain consequences of “coloniality” that it risks embodying.