Human Rights for Southern Criminology: Neoliberal Colonialism and Rights from Below

Abstract

Populations around the Global South have long suffered gross violations of human rights. This type of violence has been traditionally neglected by mainstream criminology. This chapter questions the potential of dominant human rights practice for researching violence and criminality in the Global South. Whilst there is an appeal to universal freedom and emancipation within the rights corpus it also, at times, a vehicle for constructions of brutalization which subvert attention from the structurally embedded global inequalities which shape harm in “peripheral” societies. Notably, human rights in their more formalised approach tend to see problems as moral or civilisational problems, as the result of backward or barbarous cultures and actors, failing to recognise the intersections of local political repression with failed development and social order breakdown. Whilst the call for global human rights should be lauded, their realization demands improvement through access to social goods.