Postcolonial Criminology

Criminology was born and grew up in the heart of the European empires, at the very moment they were conquering and administering half the world. Postcolonial criminology asks a question the discipline avoided for a century: what if many of our ideas about crime, justice and punishment were forged as instruments of colonial domination? Colonial power, it argues, imposed its law, criminalized the customs of subjugated peoples and constructed the "native" as a natural criminal to be watched and punished. That inheritance has not disappeared.

// OriginFanon, Agozino and the gaze of the conquered

The current draws on the anticolonial thinkers of the 20th century, above all Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) analyzed colonial violence from the side of the colonized: the colonial system is itself a permanent violence that criminalizes any resistance while legalizing its own brutality. More recently, the Nigerian criminologist Biko Agozino formalized it as postcolonial (or "counter-colonial") criminology, accusing classical criminology of having been a "science of imperial control" that studied the colonized as dangerous objects and never asked about the crimes of colonization itself.

Its charge is twofold. Colonialism produced crime by imposing alien laws on peoples who had their own: ancestral practices, communal property or traditional justice suddenly became "crimes". And colonialism committed the greatest crimes in history (slavery, genocide, plunder, engineered famines), never judged as such because the one who defined the crime was the one who committed it. Instead of asking why the colonized offends, the current asks why the colonizer's violence was never a crime.

// In fictionFaces of colonial violence

Colonel Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now, heir to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is the deepest symbol: an officer who carries the logic of conquest to the extreme and finds "the horror" in his own heart, the civilization he claimed to defend revealed as a killing machine. Colonel Quaritch, in Avatar, is colonialism at its most naked: a soldier who fights an indigenous people to plunder their land, convinced that his technology and force give him the right. Lord Beckett, in Pirates of the Caribbean, is its corporate face: the East India Company lord who rules the seas with mass hangings in the name of trade, a reminder that colonialism was a commercial enterprise.

Clayton, the hunter in Tarzan, is the colonial mentality in miniature: he arrives in a foreign land seeing only prey and loot. Colonel Tavington, in The Patriot, fits less well: he is an imperial officer who burns a church with people inside, but his victims are the colonists themselves, so he illustrates the imperial repression of rebellion rather than the conquest of colonized peoples.

CK

Apocalypse Now · Film

Colonel Kurtz

CQ

Avatar · Film

Colonel Quaritch

CB

Pirates of the Caribbean · Film

Cutler Beckett

CT

The Patriot · Film

Colonel Tavington

CL

Tarzan · Film

Clayton

From the maddened officer to the corporate lord: faces of the violence that called itself order. Tap to open their case file.

// The inheritanceThe colonial that is still alive

Postcolonial criminology holds that colonial structures continue to operate, transformed. The penal systems of many countries of the global South descend directly from colonial codes, designed to control the population rather than to do justice. In the North, formerly colonized populations and their migrant descendants still suffer disproportionate criminalization: they are watched, arrested and imprisoned far above their demographic weight, continuing the old construction of the colonized as a natural suspect. The "war on drugs", border control and the surveillance of migrant neighborhoods read, to this current, as the long shadow of a logic that still decides who is dangerous by where they come from.

// The crackNeither an alibi for the present, nor a denial of the real harm

The first crack is using the colonial denunciation as an alibi: "every crime by a descendant of the colonized is anticolonial resistance". That the penal system has colonial roots and real biases does not turn every concrete crime into a political act nor erase its victims, who usually belong to the same community. The theory explains the structural bias of the system; it does not excuse the individual harm. The second crack is reductionism: explaining everything by colonialism, as if there were no other causes of crime or as if precolonial societies had no violence and injustice of their own. The mature version points out that colonialism added a brutal layer of domination and criminalization whose consequences endure.

A third tension is embodied by Fanon himself: anticolonial violence. He analyzed it as an almost inevitable response to the settler's violence; the honest current recognizes its logic without sanctifying every act, aware that liberating violence also leaves victims and can breed new tyrannies.

// Why it mattersDecolonizing the gaze on crime

Postcolonial criminology forces the discipline into a radical self-critique. Decolonizing the gaze means always asking who defined the crime and whom that definition served; listening to the peoples once studied as dangerous objects; and counting, at last, as crimes the massive harms that power committed in the name of order. As long as penal control keeps falling disproportionately on the descendants of the colonized, the old logic will keep operating under new names.