‘The Earth is one but the world is not’: Criminological theory and its geopolitical divisions

Knowledge divides

The geopolitical imbalances of criminological theory and criminological knowledge production in general, are by no means specific to the discipline. In its recent state of the art report entitled Knowledge Divides, the International Social Science Council (2010) outlines the systematic disparities in the volume, quality and visibility of social science research and the continued supremacy of American-European social science, resulting in large part from disparities in research capacity. The report points out that in the past decade or so North America alone produced more than half of the social science articles, while Europe comes second with almost 40 per cent (2010: 143). The inequalities in funding opportunities, access to scientific journals, the brain drain and the language divides, all contribute to the persistent and even deepening divisions in knowledge production. Despite some success stories such as Brazil, the division has been deepened and strengthened also by the recent trends towards internationalization and greater trans-national collaboration, which place the central nodes of research networks firmly into the West.

These findings can serve as a backdrop for a discussion of a more fundamental disparity within the social sciences concerning their theory production. Global inequalities are not only a matter of resource allocation, but may be embedded in the ways social theorists view the world, situate their research interests, define the social and reflect over the general applicability of their knowledge. Several observers have pointed out the challenges that the lack of systematic research on southern empirical realities, and the inadequate acknowledgement of the existing research, pose for the development of general social theory. Keim (2010: 169) thus argues that the North Atlantic domination ‘leads to a strongly distorted form of universality’ within social theory where ‘the North Atlantic particular is thought to have universal validity’:

These supposedly general theories do not take into account the experience of the majority of humanity, those living in the global South. … The social realities in the southern hemisphere are thus subsumed, without further thought, under the claims produced in the North.

One of the most sustained recent critiques of the northern epistemic hegemony comes from Connell (2006, 2007), who sees much of modern sociological theory as defined by its metropolitan geo-political location. According to Connell (2006: 258), the northerness of general social theory takes place through four main textual moves: (a) the claim of universality; (b) reading from the centre; (c) gestures of exclusion; and (d) grand erasure. While the limitations of space do not allow for a detailed analysis of these claims, I would like to bring attention particularly to the first two.

A discovery of generalizations, claims about transferability and universality of knowledge are essential aspects of theoretical thinking. However, Connell’s quarrel with much of (western) social theory is that it makes claims to universal relevance without explicitly acknowledging its metropolitan origin. Theoretical claims are thus generalizations of the particular and specific experiences of metropolitan countries, or cities within those countries. A similar point has been also made by Haraway (1988) in her analysis of ‘situated knowledges’, where she points out that only the privileged do not have to account for the embodied locus that they occupy as knowledge producers. One consequence of this epistemological stance is that the position of universality is unavailable to most non-western theorists, who are defined through their particularity: ‘Social scientists in the periphery cannot universalize a locally generated perspective because its specificity is immediately obvious. … It is only from the metropole that a credible tacit claim of universality can be made’ (Connell, 2006: 258). Scholarship from the periphery thus has to appropriate the metropolitan vocabulary in order to be read and to be perceived as ‘cutting edge’. As Braithwaite and Drahos (cited in Shearing and Marks, 2010: 139) put it, ‘it is the symbolic centre that defines the aspirations, the hopes and the standards of excellence of the periphery’.

Although these debates are by no means novel, they have been until recently mainly confined to the more specific field of the post-colonial theory and the various critiques of the coloniality of knowledge (Spivak, 1988). They also in many aspects mirror the issues taken up by feminist scholars like Haraway and others, who have pointed out that being confined to the particular is one of the essential characteristics of sexism. ¹ Nevertheless, the debates about the universality of knowledge have gathered a renewed force in recent years due to the ongoing internationalization of the social sciences and the growing impact of, and interest in, globalization. The globalizing social condition creates novel methodological and theoretical imperatives, which have been, among others, articulated through the critique of the so-called methodological nationalism (Aas, 2007; Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Transnational interconnectedness and interdependence challenge established national frameworks of thought and demand an outward looking perspective, as well as contributing to a generally more international academic habitus.

On the one hand, the growing awareness of global connectedness represents an impetus to develop methodological, theoretical and conceptual approaches which transcend the established ethnocentric frameworks and are built on a more expansive and inclusive geographical imagination. The progress of globalization may therefore present an opportunity to redress the existing imbalances and to develop scholarly approaches which are more equally distributed in geo-political terms. This is not only due to a sense of global justice or ‘epistemological democracy’ (Connell, 2010), but also because the self-sufficiency of an ethnocentric framework is today, as an epistemological position, less sustainable than before, due to the complex enmeshment of national and local societies with each other. However, whether a more internationalist orientation will in fact be sufficient to reverse the ‘one way flow of ideas’ (Connell in Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 13), and contribute towards developing an interactive global outlook (Cain, 2000), is a different question. Several observers have specifically pointed out that globalization may have the opposite effect and may in fact reinforce existing asymmetries of knowledge and prove to be yet another universalizing force. Globalization’s western bias may prove an impetus for creating even larger, less nuanced and more encompassing readings of the social (Aas, 2011), even more intensified export of concepts and theories, and development of what Burawoy (2008: 437) has termed ‘global sociology as universalism from above’.

Contextualizing criminology

In what follows I shall explore the dilemmas presented above as they relate to criminological scholarship, particularly its theoretical foundations. In likeness with the other social sciences, criminology’s history and present has been marked by a similar, if not even more pronounced, constellation of northern production. Although its origins are marked by a surprising intensity of international connections (Knepper and Ystehede, forthcoming), criminology has been traditionally a discipline of the West (Agozino; 2003; Morrison, 2006), as well as a discipline under a strong Anglo-American dominance in terms of its theoretical production (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999). As Morrison (2006) points out, the production of criminology has been associated with a particular set of nation states. What is nationally produced, such as for example Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990) A General Theory of Crime, ‘is simply assumed to provide a “general criminology”’ (Morrison, 2006: 53). This has produced some paradoxical developments, since a country which is by most measures a penal outlier and an exception, represents empirically and theoretically the most illuminated criminological landscape, while other (exceptional and unexceptional) candidates remain in the shadows. For example, the author’s recent study trip to Palestine revealed that in a land where according to some estimates, almost half of the adult male population has been imprisoned, essentially inverting the notion of ‘a society of captives’, and where the authorities have even established a Ministry for Detainees, criminology virtually does not exist as an academic discipline, even though other social sciences seem to be well established. It may not be surprising that the country has received limited criminological attention from the outside because of its specific security situation. However, such an engagement can provide a wealth of productive insights about the nature of surveillance, the dynamics of the war on terror and various aspects of militarization of social control (see, inter alia, Ochs, 2011; Zureik et al., 2011).

Recent years have nevertheless seen two important developments, which have, each in its own way, contributed towards a more nuanced geo-spatial analysis. First, the burgeoning field of comparative criminology and criminal justice has brought attention to the importance of understanding national and local, cultural and political context in the studies of crime and punishment (see, inter alia, Cavadino and Dignan, 2005; Crawford, 2011; Lacey, 2008; Nelken, 2010). Although by and large still keeping the nation state as its primary point of departure, comparative engagement adds much needed nuance to universalistic claims about the potentially global scope of penal trends (often extrapolated from the US developments), as well as encouraging critical reflection about the transferability of criminal justice policies and solutions to other countries and locations.

It should be noted though that the comparative criminological tradition has, with some notable exceptions, circumscribed large parts of the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Even in Europe, while developments in the older EU countries are catalogued and analysed in great detail, the former Eastern Bloc is often conspicuously absent from the analysis. This may be partly due to questions of access and a lack of reliable data (which in the EU case is rapidly changing), but more important is the perception of these countries as an exotic periphery, interesting as they may be, whose relevance for the general theoretical discussion is limited. Seen in this light, the label ‘societies in transition’ can be seen as a metropolitan translation for ‘not yet like us’, and thus not yet of interest. A question can be asked though whether criminological theory, by paying scarce attention to Eastern Europe, is missing an opportunity to obtain invaluable insight into the making of market societies and the criminogenic effects of capitalism, privatization, rapid social stratification and dismantling of social security systems (although see, inter alia, Nikolic-Ristanovic, 2002; Piacentini, 2004; Varese, 2005). A closer look at Eastern Europe also offers an opportunity to examine the validity of criminological assumptions in diverse national and local settings, such as, for example, the often presumed connections between neoliberalism, inequality and the punitive state.

A second development which has in the past decade or so contributed towards expanding criminology’s geographical imagination has been the growing interest in transnational justice and globalization. From the burgeoning literature in transnational policing, international criminal justice and human rights, the global war on terror, policy transfers and environmental crime, the global is an increasingly popular frame of reference, in empirical as well as theoretical terms. Like comparative approaches, the awareness of the importance of transnational connections has encouraged criminology as a discipline to transcend its traditionally national framework. However, while the comparative outlook has contributed towards greater nuance and contextualization, global approaches tend to be more expansionist in theoretical terms and may in fact produce the opposite effect. As an analytical category, globalization has attracted a fair amount of critics, who have been wary of its totalizing tendencies, its allusions to homogeneity and claims about the global society developing in a uniform direction. As an adjective, the global has been, in criminology, as in other social science disciplines, associated with the telling of ‘big stories’ and the use of big words, such as justice, markets, neoliberalism and human rights. Globalization is built on the logic of social expansion. And as Tsing (2011) points out, this logic involves a belief that both knowledge and things are ‘scalable’, that they have ‘the ability to expand without distorting the frame’; that they, like computer-generated maps, can be ‘zoomed out’ to higher levels of abstraction. The expansive logic of scaling, which underlines globalization as a social process, has been also present in much of the theorizing about the global. The universalistic claims and all-encompassing readings of the social have in sociology and other social sciences encountered critique for systematically neglecting the importance of context and engaging in projects of constructing a context-free, global social science ‘from above’ (Burawoy, 2008).

Given the pervasive knowledge divides, the move towards a more global social science, while undoubtedly producing a wealth of empirical insights, has so far taken place without necessarily adding new voices to the debate and contributing to the creation of social theory which is of substantial relevance for the understanding of southern realities. Several critics have therefore pointed out the need to bring new, subaltern voices to the debate (Burawoy, 2008; De Sousa Santos, 2008). I would like to suggest that also criminologists should recognize the merits of Burawoy’s (2008: 437, emphases in original) diagnosis of sociology as being in need of a ‘double contextualization’: ‘A global sociology from below involves a dialogue between a sociology of globalization with its context specific effects and a globalization of sociology, rooted in context specific practices.’

A ‘global research imagination’ (Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 4), by itself, can therefore produce a variety of perspectives. As Connell (in Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 56) observes, ‘one could be notionally internationalist and yet intellectually oriented to the metropole’. In order to avoid the dangers of building on a one-way reading of the social and creating a false sense of universality—a universalism from above—a geo-politically more sensitive theoretical approach needs to develop not only an awareness of the various aspects of global inter-connectedness and inter-dependence, but, crucially, also a conceptual apparatus for analysing global divisions, inequalities, frictions and fragmentation (Aas, 2011). Well expressed by Burawoy’s (2008) notion of ‘grounding the transnational’, this approach demands a nuanced understanding of globalization which, as Sassen (in Kenway and Fahey, 2009) points out, has to do with the sub-national rather than just the trans-national and the self-evident constitution of global processes. Rather than studying ‘the trickle-down effect of abstract global imperatives’ (Chalfin, 2010: xvi), nor simply acknowledging the specificities of the local and the regional, this article wishes to promote an argument for developing empirical and theoretical approaches, which build on the situatedness of the global within the national and the local. It therefore reiterates Haraway’s (1988: 583) call for ‘situated and embodied knowledges and an argument against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims. … There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths.’

I shall return to the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of ‘seeing from the peripheries’ in a moment. First, however, I would like to bring to attention the potential dangers of developing context-free responses to global challenges. The perils of seeing the social through the global, ‘zoomed out’, gaze are especially well exemplified in Gupta’s (2010) recent analysis of the prevalent responses to global poverty. ‘One size fits all’ solutions favoured by donors, World Bank and other international institutions, are designed on a premise that poverty can be measured by universal criteria and its solutions standardized and detached from the historic and structural conditions of inequality which are responsible for its very existence. By de-contextualizing poverty, the approach invites ‘solutions’ that are largely ineffective. Gupta’s observations draw our attention to how the various conceptions and theories of global problems are intrinsically connected to their proposed political solutions, to the practices of power and the various conceptions of order. As Hurrell (2007: 20) observes, ‘the language of “international order” or “global governance” is never politically neutral’; it is marked by the unequal power relations and divergent values. Given the pervasive global inequalities, the present patterns of global order and governance designate certain societies as rule givers and others as ‘rule takers’: ‘Divergent values also become more salient as the legal order moves down from high-minded sloganizing towards detailed and extremely intrusive operational rules and towards stronger mechanisms for their implementation’ (Hurrell, 2007: 10).

The dilemmas are particularly evident in several transnational responses to contemporary security challenges, such as terrorism and narcotics. The challenges, as well as the responses to them, tend to be defined as ‘scalable’, to use Tsing’s (2011) term. The ability to press the ‘zoom out’ button is a precondition for creation of standardized responses, which are independent of local conditions, concrete relationships and historic contingencies. Looking at the effects of the global war on drugs, Bowling (2011) observes that the policy is one among several other examples of how western crime control models have been exported transnationally and have not only failed to achieve their original purpose, but have also created a series of harmful side-effects, including corruption, money laundering and armed violence.

However, what is of analytical interest here is not only the question of potential ineffectiveness of global prohibitions and crime policy exports. The issue also brings up a more fundamental question about how well equipped is criminology’s theoretical and analytical arsenal to ‘zoom-down’ and capture empirical realities in diverse settings outside its traditional geographical boundaries. Bowling (2011) asks to what extent can our existing theories of crime causation be applied to cases of extreme violence, such as armed violence and mass murder? Although not explicit, criminology’s theoretical roots in the West make it ill equipped to provide meaningful perspectives on such southern realities. According to Morrison (2006), criminology has throughout history confined itself to the ‘civilized space’, a territorial imagination which excludes from view the uncivilized aspects of the colonial modernity, such as mass killing and genocide. By ‘pushing violence somewhere else’ (Morrison, 2006: 28), criminological theory addresses itself to a by and large pacified domestic space, which has been seen as separate from the far more volatile, less pacified spaces of the (colonial) global south (although see, for example, Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2009).

The issue of situatedness of criminological theory becomes evident if we look, for example, at one of the most influential theoretical approaches in the past decade: theorizing about risk society. How does risk look when not perceived from a metropolitan perspective? How does the approach look from other geopolitical locations, such as for example certain Latin American countries which are plagued by endemic violence? Mexico’s deadly, US-sponsored drug war has claimed nearly 40,000 lives in the past five years (Padgett, 2011). By comparison, the undertone of much of risk writing has been a critique of actuarialism, of overactive securitization moves and moral panic-driven responses, with an underlying implication that the attempts of crime control agencies tend to be an overreaction in generally secure societies and have taken place at the expense of justice. However, the pre-emptiveness of responses to potential security threats in many western societies stands in a stark contrast to the frequent lack of responsiveness to very immediate security threats from the official criminal justice systems in the South. In fact, in countries such as Brazil and Mexico, these systems in themselves may present a real source of danger to their inhabitants (Campesi, 2010).

Questions of situatedness and positionality of knowledge, and the geopolitical context of our analytical interests, are thus of vital importance to theory production. Who and where is the ‘subject at risk’ and who and where is the ‘risky subject’? Although without doubt carrying resonance in a variety of national and local settings, the dilemmas of weighing security and justice may look substantially different depending on the geopolitical position of the participants in the debate and the affected subjects. For example, a glimpse of how a critical discourse on excessive state powers of detention depends on ‘who is talking’, may be found in the letter written to the Guardian in June 2008 by the Bolivian president Evo Morales. The letter, entitled ‘42 days? Try 18 months’, was written in the context of a lively public debate about the British government proposal to introduce 42 days pre-charge detention for suspects in its war on terror. While the proposal was widely debated, opposed and finally abandoned as an infringement on individual liberty, Morales points out that, during the same period, the European Union introduced the so-called ‘return directive’ which allows for a six-month detention of undocumented migrants with a possibility of extension for a further 12 months. The measure went largely unnoticed by criminologists and criminal lawyers alike, even though it has extended the scope of detention for thousands of non-western citizens (Cornelisse, 2010).

The problematic universality (and superficiality) of criminological theorizing has also been pointed out by Birkbeck (2011) who argues that North American writing on imprisonment is often ill suited for analysing Latin American realities. Both quantitatively and qualitatively, confinement looks different when seen from a southern perspective:

Quantitatively, control in North American penal facilities is assiduous (unceasing, persistent and intrusive), while in Latin America it is perfunctory (sporadic, indifferent and cursory). Qualitatively, North American penal facilities produce imprisonment (which enacts penal intervention through confinement), while in Latin America they produce internment (which enacts penal intervention through release).

Criminological theory therefore faces a challenge of naming and conceptualizing the various forms of confinement around the world (including the immigration detention mentioned above), which do not ‘meet the standards’ of imprisonment as seen through the prism of western theory, yet are a formal part of penal systems, are intended as punishments or have distinct punitive elements (see Bosworth, forthcoming; Jefferson, 2007).

‘The Earth is one but the world is not’

According to Connell (2006: 259), one of the defining aspects of northern social theory is its ‘reading from the center’; a tendency to ‘construct[s] a social world read through the metropole—not read through the metropole’s action on the rest of the world’. I would like to suggest that this particular aspect is one of the crucial drawbacks which potentially make criminological analysis ill equipped to understand the dynamics of the contemporary global interdependence. In case of drug trafficking, mentioned above, just as with environmental crime, terrorism, cybercrime and a number of other security issues, the challenges have become transnational and are a product of a long chain of geographically often dispersed and un-bounded events and actions. This interconnectedness also reveals the complexity of contemporary security threats, particularly the intertwining of global economic flows and the politics of everyday security and peace.

The intensity and the multi-faceted nature of security interdependence forces us to develop ways of integrating perspectives on spatialized, geo-political aspects of global (in)justice into the theorizing on punishment and deviance, very much in line with Beck’s (2002: 41) observation that contemporary risk societies are marked by a three-dimensional de-bounding of risk. De-bounded risks are no longer linked to specific geographic locations and national boundaries; moreover, they can have unlimited temporal dimensions and it is difficult to delineate their social dimensions in terms of causes, affectedness and responsibility. Although by no means novel, the changing landscape of risk and harm represents a series of challenges of both normative and explanatory kind. When it comes to the former, examples such as international terrorism, the new media consumption and ecological damage, raise a series of issues about if, when and how to assign responsibility and criminalize behaviours whose harms are indirectly produced and remote in spatial, temporal and social terms. Do these novel ‘geometries of harm’ represent a form of ‘hypercrime’ (McGuire, 2007) or, following the received criminological wisdom, is the language of criminality in these contexts even more counter-productive than ever?

If globalization can be understood as the world’s progressive ‘entanglement with itself’ (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2011), criminological theory needs to develop conceptual perspectives which would enable us to examine the varied and complex nature of these entanglements. I have elsewhere suggested (Aas, 2011) that in order to grasp globalization as an interactive process, and to capture the interplay between globalization (past and present), global inequality and (in)security, criminological theory needs to amend an important historic omission, namely, its neglect of colonialism. With some notable exceptions (Agozino, 2003; Bosworth and Flavin, 2007; Cunneen, 2011), ² colonialism has been of scarce analytical interest to criminological theory. This may be partly due to a general myopia and lack of historic interest within the discipline, or what Laub (2004) describes as its presentism and collective amnesia. In the present climate of breathtaking information production and new public management-inspired audits the premium seems to be on the immediacy of knowledge and on surfing on the surface of the present.

Nevertheless, the neglect of colonialism is not simply a result of a general lack of interest in history (which, at present, is rapidly changing), but rather a reflection of a more fundamental northern analytical focus which, as Connell (2006: 257) observes, builds on ‘the conception of theory that makes the anti-colonial struggle irrelevant’ and where ‘the European conceptual framing is self-sufficient’. And it is precisely this self-sufficiency of the European, North-American or other national framings which is disturbed by the present intensity of cross-border connections. However, globalizing processes and transnational connections create a world which is not only connected and interdependent in novel and unprecedented ways, but is also divided, fragmented and fractured (Aas, 2011). The thought was aptly summarized in the first line of the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987/1991: 27): ‘The Earth is one but the world is not.’ The statement marks an acknowledgement that despite a growing awareness of common ecological challenges and concerns, the global answers to these problems are marked by uneven development, inequality and the pursuit of self-interest by states and communities. Perspectives studying the dynamics and legacies of imperialism and (post-)colonialism can help us make sense of these divisions.

The global does therefore not present itself as a smooth, unified surface, a plane of immanence accessible through a zoom function, but rather as a dynamic multiplicity of surfaces and tectonic boundaries. It is in these meeting points and frictions between the global north and south, between the licit and illicit worlds, that criminology has an opportunity to gain (and to provide other social sciences with) invaluable insight into the nature of the contemporary world order. We are faced not only with a plurality of worlds, but also with a plurality of globalizations. On the infrastructural backbone of the licit globalization operates, what Gilman et al. (2011) term, ‘deviant globalization’, which is increasingly competing with its licit counterpart in terms of size, profitability and political influence. Deviant entrepreneurship is ‘a survival strategy for those without easy access to legitimate, sustainable market opportunities’ (Gilman et al., 2011: 272):

it is both a powerful engine of wealth creation and a symbol of their exclusion and abjection. On the one hand, participating in deviant globalization is often an individual’s fastest ticket out of poverty and a way for the entire community to experience economic development.

Deviant globalization is situated at the meeting points and intersections between global regulatory regimes and divergent economic and value positions. These meeting points are often both lucrative and intensely violent and reveal, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2006: 17) observe,

the dangerous liaisons between north and south, about the ways in which ‘respectable’ metropolitan trade gains by deflecting the risks and moral taint of outlaw commerce ‘beyond the border’. An increasing proportion of postcolonial enterprise may appear shady and brutal, but it is integral to the workings of the global scheme of things.

By exploring the blurry and difficult boundaries between licit and illicit trades and activities, and examining the global legal supremacy of the North, its powers to make illegal not only people (Dauvergne, 2008), but also narcotic substances, networks and political regimes, criminological scholarship has the potential to capture the ‘contemporary geometries of spatialised injustice’ (Squire, 2011: 4). Instead of perceiving ‘deviant globalization’ as ‘a removable cancer in an otherwise healthy global economy’ (Gilman et al., 2011: 5)—and thereby limiting its interventions to providing recipes for more efficient and effective legal regulation and law enforcement—criminological scholarship may need to take off the normative glasses, which are often intrinsically connected to the interests of the northern states, and acknowledge it as ‘a massive permanent phenomenon that is central to the lives of hundreds of millions of people’ (Gilman et al., 2011: 5). ³ Moreover, it can serve as a reminder of the importance of spatial differences, of locality and resistance, and of the essential unpredictability of global encounters (Aas, 2011).

Precisely because world centres do not, and cannot, provide a template for global change, the studies of the periphery offer invaluable insight into global–local dynamics and into the productivity of friction (Tsing, 2005): ‘As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power’ (Tsing, 2005: 5). Through this epistemological stance the global south becomes a vital space for theory construction, a platform for theorizing the global from the periphery. Studies, such as Chalfin’s (2010) recent ethnography of state sovereignty in West Africa, offer an insight into the rapidly changing ‘neoliberal frontiers’. Rather than treat the specificies of her case as aberrations, as is often the case with studies of the periphery, ‘they are taken to expose the hidden, contradictory, and/or unacknowledged priorities and principals of so-called global norms’ (Chalfin, 2010: 35).

Therefore, in line with our previous discussion on the situated nature of theorizing about risk, a similar question can be asked about criminological theories of the state: Which state? Where is it situated and what are its historic and geopolitical contexts? Like risk, the state tends to be spoken about in general terms, as ‘the State’. This depiction in criminological scholarship almost without exception means the western state, mainly North American, UK, Australia, Western Europe, occasionally Russia, while examples of ‘lesser statehood’ are far more seldom considered. Notwithstanding the centrality of the governmentality tradition in the past two decades, the presumption of established state sovereignty is implicit in much of criminological writing about the security, surveillant, authoritarian, punitive and other varieties of states. However, I would like to suggest that states, where strong and established sovereignty cannot be presumed, may be of great theoretical interest by offering a springboard for reflection on the nature of the state globally, under what some observers perceive as a general trend towards waning sovereignty (Brown, 2010): ‘Rather than proceeding from the assumption that all states are sovereign, we are interested in considering the variety of ways in which states are constantly negotiating their sovereignty’ (Weber, 1996 in Chalfin, 2010: 41).

This is not to deny the strength of the nation state, nor its authoritarian tendencies, in many settings throughout the global north and south (Hallsworth and Lea, 2011). Rather, it is an invitation to examine some of the prevalent assumptions about statehood and consider theoretical accounts which diverge from the western ideas and ideals of statehood; to examine cases where the state’s ability to ‘ultimately call the shots’ on its territory (Chalfin, 2010: 3) is challenged in myriad ways by non-state, anti-state and trans-state actors, by a variety of networks (digital, licit and illicit), by the neoliberal economic imperatives and, ultimately, by the implosion of social order, be it from violence, corruption or financial misdealings and instability. The effects of the recent financial crisis may indicate that states which are torn apart from within and abandoning sovereign modes of governing may be a phenomenon much closer to the criminological homeland than expected. In these contexts, the postcolonial can become

a crucial site for theory construction, sui generis. To the extent that they are harbingers of a global future, of the rising neoliberal age at its most assertive, these polities are also where limits of social knowledge demand to be engaged.

Conclusion

Gayatri Spivak (1988) has famously asked: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ As an answer to her question, Connell (2010) posed another one: ‘Can the metropole listen?’ This article has outlined a number of pervasive knowledge divides which may indicate that the answer to his question would, at present, be negative. However, the article has also attempted to provide arguments for why the metropole should listen. Developing more democratic epistemologies is not only a question of epistemological justice, but increasingly also an analytical imperative and an opportunity for theoretical innovation. By reiterating the importance of developing ‘peripheral vision’ and a more sensitive geopolitical imagination, my objective has not been to propose an alternative, a radical other, to the existing northern patterns of knowledge production. ‘The alternative to ‘northern theory’ is not a unified doctrine from the global South’ (Connell, 2006: 262), nor are southern perspectives by any means immune to reproducing metropolitan models of knowledge and power relations. There is, as Haraway (1988: 584) observes,

a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic. … The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical reexamination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of inquiry. The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretative core of all knowledge.

Today, the lines of demarcation between the global north and south are far from simple. ‘The north these days, contains much south’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006: 18) and it is precisely in this inversion of borders, of the internal and the external spaces, which makes greater knowledge of southern realities all the more urgent. Due to the proliferation of spaces of colonial difference in the midst of the prosperous west, Nussbaum’s observation (in Harvey, 2000: 531) that a society unable to look at itself through the lens of the other is, as a consequence, equally ignorant of itself, is today more salient than ever. A globally conscious research imagination is, according to Appadurai (in Kenway and Fahey, 2009: 49), an attempt at developing ‘systematic forms of humility and de-parochialization’. When it comes to criminological theory, this would involve a greater awareness of space, geography and geopolitical context, as well as critical self-reflection about the potential universality of its own knowledge production: ‘[I]t is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests’ (Haraway, 1988: 584).

In his critical examination of Kant’s cosmopolitan theory, Harvey (2000) observes a curious gap between the universality of Kant’s cosmopolitan philosophy and his dubious grip on practical geography. And while Kant’s abstract writing on perpetual peace has became a colossal source of inspiration to cosmopolitan theory, his thinking on practical geography is by now not only forgotten but also seen as irrelevant to his philosophical writing. Yet, the two should not be separated. In line with Harvey, this article has made an argument for acknowledging the importance and the disruptive effects of geographical knowledge and spatial understanding for more general philosophical and theoretical concerns. Rather than hiding its geographical presuppositions, the article has suggested that criminological theory should openly explore and reflect on them. Rather than envisaging the world as a flat, generic entity, which can be zoomed in and out at will, the complex nature of the contemporary world order presents us with a patchwork of unequal geographies, frictions and spaces of difference. As Hurrell (2007: 11) suggests:

Those who are concerned with the stability of the ‘one world’ will need to pay increased attention to the voices and views of the ‘many worlds’, and to those peoples and groups that have historically been marginalized in both the practices of global political order and the debates surrounding that order.

By becoming more attentive and conceptually sensitive to this specific political geography—to the plurality of worlds, the ‘deviant’ sides of globalization and the productivity of friction—criminology and criminological theory may in the future be uniquely positioned to provide an insight into the varied landscape which shapes the contours of contemporary social conflict, global (legal and penal) governance and security concerns.