ABSTRACT

The chapter utilizes ideas from Southern criminology and applies them to the UK Gang Thesis Debate in the global North. The chapter illustrates how paradigms of knowledge production have manifested tensions created through ignoring postcolonial experiences and sensibilities in favor of the arid analysis of risk tools. The chapter argues that critical realism shares a post-positivist association with postcolonial studies and feminist standpoint theory, and therefore new analysis can be gained by adopting dynamic methodologies which acknowledge layered ontologies and relative epistemologies.