Criminal Legalities And Minorities In The Global South

This book explores how the law and the institutions of the criminal justice system expose minorities to different types of violence, either directly, through discrimination and harassment, or indirectly, by creating the conditions that make them vulnerable to violence from other groups of society. It draws on empirical insights across a broad array of communities and locales including Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Malawi, Turkey, Brazil, Singapore, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It examines the challenges of protecting those at the margins of power, especially those whom the law is often used to oppress. The chapters explore intersecting, marginal identities influenced by four factors: rebuilding after violent regimes, economic interest behind the violence, entrenched cultural biases, and criminalisation of diversity. It provides scholars from the Global North with important lessons when attempting to impose their own solutions onto nations with a different history and context, or when applying their own laws to migrants from the Global South nations explored in this book. It speaks to legal and social science scholars in the fields of law, sociology, criminology, and social work.

This edited volume presents the work of academics from the Global South and explores, from local and regional settings, how the legal order and people’s perceptions of it translates into an understanding of what constitutes "criminal" behaviors or activities. This book aims to address the gap between criminal law in theory and practice in the Global South by assembling 11 chapters from established and emerging scholars from various underrepresented regions of the world. Drawing on research from Singapore, the Philippines, Peru, Indonesia, India, the Dominican Republic, Burma, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Argentina, this book explores a range of issues that straddle the line between social deviance and legal crimes in such societies, including extramarital affairs, gender-based violence, gambling, LGBT issues, and corruption. Issues of inclusivity versus exclusivity, modernity versus tradition, globalization of capital versus cultural revivalism are explored. The contributions critically analyze the role politics and institutions play in shaping these issues. There is an urgent need for empirical studies and new theoretical approaches that can capture the complexity of crime phenomena that occur in the Global South. This book will provide essential material to facilitate the development of new approaches more suitable to understanding the social phenomena related to crime in these societies. This book will make an important contribution in the development of Southern criminology. It will be of interest to students and researchers of criminology and sociology engaged in studies of sentencing and punishment, theories of crime, law and practice, and postcolonialism.

This insightful book examines the allegations against the professionalism, transparency, and integrity of law enforcement toward minority groups, from a global perspective. It addresses the challenges inherent in maintaining strong ties with members of the community, and draws attention to obstacles in ensuring public confidence and trust in rule of law institutions. Most importantly, the book provides insight into mechanisms and proposals for policy reform that would permit enhanced police-community partnership, collaboration and mutual respect. Acknowledging the consistency of this concern despite geographic location, ethnic diversity, and religious tolerance, this book considers controversial factors that have caused many groups and individuals to question their relationship with law enforcement. The book examines the context of police-community relations with contributed research from Nigeria, South Africa, Kosovo, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico, Scandinavia and other North American and European viewpoints. It evaluates the roles that critical factors such as ethnicity, political instability, conflict, colonization, mental health, police practice, religion, critical criminology, socialism, and many other important aspects and concepts have played on perceptions of policing and rule of law. A valuable resource for law enforcement practitioners and researchers, policy makers, and students of criminal justice, Policing and Minority Communities: Contemporary Issues and Global Perspectives confronts crucial challenges and controversies in policing today with quantitative and qualitative research and practical policy recommendations.

This book explores whether the legal and political institutions of Afghanistan were able to incorporate diverse ethnic groups into the political process. Ethnic accommodation has gained central stage in the literature on institutional design and democratic consolidation. However, some divided societies are more explored than others, and Afghanistan is one understudied country that is critically important for testing and improving our theories of institutional design in a democratizing, plural society. This work examines the Constitution of 2004 and those provisions of electoral laws and political party laws that together devised Afghan political institutions including those of the presidential system, unitary government, electoral systems as well as the party system. It argues that due to their incongruence in design and effects, the Afghan political institutions failed to fully accommodate ethnic groups in the political process. This book adopts a holistic approach, while also paying careful attention to the details of each of the individual pieces of political institutions designed by the Constitution of 2004. Taken together, this approach yields insights into the boundaries and interactions of institutional design and how their interactions hinder or advance ethnic accommodation in varying contexts. The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy makers interested in constitutional law and politics.

The first comprehensive collection of its kind, this handbook addresses the problem of knowledge production in criminology, redressing the global imbalance with an original focus on the Global South. Issues of vital criminological research and policy significance abound in the Global South, with important implications for South/North relations as well as global security and justice. In a world of high speed communication technologies and fluid national borders, empire building has shifted from colonising territories to colonising knowledge. The authors of this volume question whose voices, experiences, and theories are reflected in the discipline, and argue that diversity of discourse is more important now than ever before. Approaching the subject from a range of historical, theoretical, and social perspectives, this collection promotes the Global South not only as a space for the production of knowledge, but crucially, as a source of innovative research and theory on crime and justice. Wide-ranging in scope and authoritative in theory, this study will appeal to scholars, activists, policy-makers, and students from a wide range of social science disciplines from both the Global North and South, including criminal justice, human rights, and penology.

This book enquires into the counter-hegemonic capacity of international criminal justice. It highlights perspectives and themes that have thus far often been neglected in the scholarship on (critical approaches to) international criminal justice. Can international criminal justice be viewed as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ project? And if so, under what conditions? In response to these questions, scholars and practitioners from the Global South and North reflect inter alia on the engagement with international criminal justice in the context of Ukraine, Palestine, and minorities in South-Asia while also highlighting the hegemonic tendencies built into the institutional structure of the International Criminal Court on the axes of gender and language. Florian Jeßberger is Professor of Criminal Law and Director of the Franz von Liszt Institute for International Criminal Justice, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Leonie Steinl is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Kalika Mehta is an Associate Researcher at the Franz von Liszt Institute for International Criminal Justice, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

In The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, Zaffaroni, Caamaño and Vegh Weis offer an account of the misuse of the law to criminalize progressive political leaders in Latin America.

This volume considers how, based on the examination of cases pertaining to transitional justice settings that resort to local interpretations of crimes against humanity jurisprudence, fragmentation of international law and circumscribed applications of universal jurisdiction are necessary aspects of the grand enterprise to overcome the impasse of the tainted legacy of international criminal law in the Global South. If we are to proceed with adjudication of the most egregious and heinous crimes involving state criminality without facing the charge of neo-colonialist plotting, then we must reckon with localised and domesticated interpretations of international criminal law, rather than pursuing strict forms of legislative dictation of international criminal law.