ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Southern theory which has emerged as an antidote to what scholars from Australasia and parts of the developing world have seen to be the intellectual and explanatory hegemony of the Northern Hemisphere not least in the area of crime and criminal behaviour. Criminology has been highly urban-centric, as well as ‘terra-centric’, pursuing a highly selective focus on crime and justice in large population centres to the exclusion of the many more spaces and places that lie beyond them. Southern criminology seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the global North. Violence and organized crime are intimately related to other problems, of governance, poverty and environmental destruction, while the default assumptions of feminist criminology have mirrored those of the discipline by elevating and reproducing certain forms of metropolitan thinking. Punishment was itself an instrument for projecting imperial power and culture across the globe. Penal transportation and the founding of convict colonies in the global South were critical components of the statecraft of modern imperial powers.
