Browse Hierarchy LAW6173: Global Criminology: Global Crime, Punishment and Justice

This course situates the study of criminology in a global and inter-disciplinary context to destabilize state- and Euro-centric conceptions of crime, punishment and justice. It starts by proposing different beginnings for criminology that reveal that in some sense the discipline has always been global. We begin with anthropological studies of so-called 'primitive' societies. How are social transgressions conceptualized and dealt with in stateless settings? Is there a concept of 'crime' to begin with? What work does the concept of crime do in organizing society? Who is being protected and who is being disciplined? We then explore two formative contexts for criminal justice: slavery and colonialism. What is the relationship between modern police forces and slave patrols? How has the `colonial encounter¿ shaped penal and policing regimes in postcolonial and metropolitan states? After examining these `different beginnings¿, students will explore what it means to globalize crime and justice. What are we to make of 'international crimes' such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression and genocide? Does it make sense to punish individuals for collective violence such as genocide in the same way as for murder? Should we reconcile, restore or transform rather than punish after mass violence? The final part of the course looks at the global production of new forms, discourses and constituencies of criminalization and how they exclude and include people from society. Criminal justice technologies and discourses, for example, are increasingly applied to exclude refugees and migrants while some LGBTQ+ subjects are provisionally accepted into the category of 'good citizens'. How can we make sense of these new forms of criminalization and the offenders and victims they produce? How do criminal states, multinational corporations, people smugglers, child soldiers, foreign fighters, female terrorists and victims of trafficking confound our categories of victim/perpetrator in a highly racialized and gendered context of global inequality?