Humanifesto of the Decolonization of Criminology and Justice

Abstract

I bear witness as a survivor of genocide orchestrated by imperialism and carried out by neocolonial stooges who proclaimed that ‘all is fair in warfare’ and that ‘starvation is a legitimate weapon of war’ even when Igbo women and innocent men made up the bulk of the 3.1 million people killed in Biafra in 30 months. I acknowledge the knowledge of the Indigenous peoples of this land and of every land that were colonized, chattelized, racialized, victimized, pulverized, dehumanized, genocidized, proletarianized, lumpenized, marginalized, and homogenized with the tools of criminology, among other tools, for the benefits of white-supremacist imperialist patriarchy. I testify that we are survivors who were never expected to survive to meet one another and raise our voices to say, Happy Survival! To say that we are survivors is not to suggest that we have completely restored our independence but to state that for as long as the forces of imperialism are entrenched, we are determined to resist. We will keep speaking truth to unjust power the way that our ancestors defiantly stuck out their tongues and flipped their middle fingers to force the conquerors to sign treaties recognizing our autonomy as human beings equal in beauty, wisdom, culture, courage and originality. This article outlines the decolonization paradigm in criminology, the rationale for this paradigmatic shift, the major contributions to this paradigm, and a projection of the future agenda of the paradigm.