Abstract
The idea behind this novel compendium of essays came from the editors’ realization that green criminology has largely overlooked the Global South. Hence a truly transnational green criminology needs to ‘ensure that the environmental crimes and harms affecting the lands of the peoples of the Global South are brought to the forefront’ (p. 2). This unique volume about the exploitative practices of commerce, the plunder and ruination of lands by mining extraction, the mono aqua and agricultural practices that destroy bio-diversity, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ land and way of life, and the theft of wildlife in Latin America, goes a significant way to redressing this imbalance. It is not possible in this short review to do justice to the 13 original chapters, hence this review is necessarily selective and attempts a broad overview of its major themes.
The first theme centres on hierarchies of knowledge that historically have overlooked the environmental plunder of the Global South. The chapter by Gustavo Rojas-Páez illustrates well how the Eurocentric understandings of law, crime and justice have historically misrepresented the peoples of the Global South as barbarians—uncivil and less than human (Rojas-Páez, p. 62). He argues that this hierarchy of knowledge has persisted from colonial to post-colonial eras in order to justify imperial projects of ‘genocides, slavery and environmental degradation’ (Rojas-Páez, p. 63). Rojas-Páez draws on De Sousa Santos’s theory of border epistemologies to explain how the dominant epistemology excluded knowledge about the historical experience of the colonized. Indigenous knowledges, for example, were systematically subjugated by ruling colonial and post-colonial powers. These blind spots are what De Sousa Santos refers to as ‘alegal’ and therefore fail to comprehend the socio-legal realities of the colonized worlds in the Global South. Many of the chapters in this edited volume thus challenge ways of theorizing that privilege the experiences based on English-speaking countries of the Global North.
The historical injuries of the colonial period are relevant to understanding the continuation of harms in post-colonial worlds of the Global South (Rojas-Páez, p. 70). Consequently, a second theme concerns the centrality of colonial and post-colonial power relations to understanding the dynamics of ecological plunder in Latin America. The chapters by Gustavo Rojas-Páez and by Eduardo Mondaca stand out as exemplary in this respect. Mondaca’s chapter situates the growth of the salmon industry, mining and mono-agricultural and aqua-cultural activities within the historical context of the colonialization of the Archipelago of Chiloé—a group of 40 or so islands that remained loyal to its Spanish colonizers during Chile’s war of independence (1810–1818). Historically treated as inferior, strange and remote, Mondaca argues that the legacy of colonialism racialized relations between the people of the Archipelago and those of mainland Chile (Mondaca, pp. 32–37). The group of islands were neglected for 150 years, until a ‘new extractivism’ emerged under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The archipelago then became an internal territory whose abundance of natural resources (mainly copper, salmon and Eucalypt plantations) were plundered through what Mondaca describes as a violent process of neo-liberalism ‘that has caused the inhabitants of Chiloé to lose (their territory and their identity’ (Mondaca, p. 50).
The volume’s third theme is the violence of colonialism, often overlooked in the field of criminology (Carrington et al., 2016), but not in this volume. Many of the chapters provide vivid details of the commodification of nature (land, sea, water, air and non-human life) and the exploitation of subaltern peoples from the Global South who were dispossessed violently, and turned into slaves as part of the modern ‘civilizing’ processes undertaken by European colonial powers. In both the Congo and the Amazon jungles in the colonial period of the 1800s, slaves were subject to horrific punishments if they failed to deliver their quota of rubber (Rojas-Páez, p. 58). Private militia who meted out violent punishments went hand in hand with slavery. Today, private security, armed forces and militia continue to be used to police contested commercial activities (especially mining) in Columbia, Peru, Honduras, Brazil and Argentina (see the chapters by Laura Gutiérrez-Gómez, Ana Marial Weinstock, and David Rodríguez Goyes and Nigel South). Rodríguez Goyes and South liken the activities of transnational commercial enterprises in Latin America to the East India Company, ‘employing new—yet familiar—methods to plunder, seize land and gain power over natural products’ (Rodríguez Goyes and South, p. 189).
Not surprisingly, another theme throughout this book is the dispossession—and in some cases, genocide—of subaltern groups of indigenous peoples, afro-descendants of slavery and campesino communities of Latin America, by the capricious activities of inter alia palm oil extraction, mining, dam construction and aqua and agricultural development. In Columbia alone, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal, an international body based on the universal declaration of the rights of peoples, found that the existence of 28 Indigenous communities was in jeopardy due to neo-liberal modes of development and commercialization (Rojas-Páez, p. 76). Mol’s chapter on palm oil extraction in Tumaco, Columbia, is an example. She examines how the Afro-Columbian and Indigenous peoples of the region were dispossessed of their lands, not through direct violence as in the past, but through modes of capitalist production that created strategic allegiances of small growers, squeezing out alternative modes of growing palm oil and subsistence farming. She concludes, ‘[d]eforestation, the loss of land and traditional modes of subsistence, and an increased dependence on capitalist modes of production and market economies, alter the local landscape physically, socially and symbolically’ (Mol, p. 183).
The final section of the book contains three chapters on illegal wildlife trafficking—mainly due to demand for exotic reptiles, birds and pets from the jungles of the Amazon (Nassaro, p. 245). Some of the demand is for biomedical research, such as monkeys taken from the Peruvian/Columbian border for use in malaria research (Maldondo and Lafon, p. 263). Wildlife trafficking involves the abduction and death of millions of animals on an annual basis (Sollund, p. 215). The central problem identified by these authors is that traffickers enjoy a sense of impunity because wildlife trafficking is not a priority of border control, surveillance or policing in Latin American countries. Hence, penalization is not likely to have much effect. Consequently, prevention through cultural change and education might be a more effective approach to stamping out the illegal trade of wildlife (Sollund, p. 237). The failure to prioritize policing or preventing the abuse of animals is part of another hierarchy—one that elevates human life over non-human life. In this hierarchy of value, the killing of animals—what Beirne (2014: 49) terms ‘theriocide’—is not considered a crime. Until there is species justice for non-humans that recognizes theriocide, too little will be done to prevent wildlife trafficking.
The concept of neo-liberalism is used widely throughout this edited collection as a shorthand for explaining the politics behind the development of Latin American economies. This concept is subject to considerable debate between Latin American academics, some of whom argue that it is a universalist construction imported from the Global North that assumes that the countries of the Global South are mere puppets in a world order dominated by the USA and financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Sozzo, 2017). In fact, many Latin American countries have stridently contested this imposition, such as the social democracies of Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador (Sozzo, 2017: 662). Hence, the concept of neo-liberalism, imported from political theory, lacks precision and specificity and perhaps could have been used with more scepticism throughout the collection.
Otherwise, the editors of this compendium are to be congratulated for the immense effort they have undertaken to correct the blind spots of northern criminology. Several of the chapters were translated from Spanish into English and another from Portuguese into English. De Sousa Santos (2014: viii) argues there cannot be social justice without cognitive justice. The chapters in this volume contribute to the huge ongoing project of de-colonizing the theoretical toolbox of social science to render visible that which Eurocentric thought silenced for centuries. Not only should this book be read widely, but it should be seen as an example for others to follow when contemplating how to globalize edited collections in criminology.