Valdes-Riesco, Amalia --- "Can the Subaltern Speak in Criminology? Analysing the Production of Knowledge on Crimes of the Powerful in the 21st Century through Latin American Postcolonial Lenses" [2021] IntJlCrimJustSocDem 3; (2021) 10(1) International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 30

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Can the Subaltern Speak in Criminology? Analysing the Production of Knowledge on Crimes of the Powerful in the 21st Century through Latin American Postcolonial Lenses

Abstract

Through postcolonial criminological lens, this article attempts to evidence the domination of knowledge in criminology of Crimes of the powerful in the Global North and Anglo-language countries, and whether this domination translates into an influence of knowledge in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 21^st century. To address this, a scoping review search was developed to find research articles focused on Crimes of the powerful both globally and in Latin American countries, and a citation analysis performed on specific studies. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied as a search strategy. The results demonstrate that a high level of concentration exists in the production of knowledge of Crimes of the powerful studies in the Global North and Anglo-language countries compared to the Global South and non-Anglo-language countries, and also evidence the high level of influence of knowledge that Global North countries have on Latin American studies.

Keywords

Crimes of the powerful; white-collar crimes; postcolonial criminology; Southern criminology, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Valdés-Riesco A (2021) Can the subaltern speak in criminology? Analysing the production of knowledge on crimes of the powerful in the 21st century through Latin American postcolonial lenses. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 10(1): 30-51. https://doi.org/10.5204/ijcjsd.v10i1.1513

Re-visiting Crimes of the Powerful through a Postcolonial Perspective
Power, Knowledge and Crimes of the Powerful

Crimes of the powerful are understood as a general category that captures not only criminal but also harmful practices perpetrated by powerful individuals and institutions with privileged positions and networks in economic, social, political or cultural terms. Academically originating in the sociological presidential discourse in 1939, Sutherland (1940) called for the need to focus on white-collar crime and the offenders’ features of power, status and privileged positions.

His work mostly focused on financial and corporate crimes in the United States (US) (Sutherland 1949) and has since influenced several authors from other parts of the world, mostly in North America and Western Europe (e.g., Barak 1990, 2015; Braithwaite 1984; Chambliss 1989; Clinard, Quinney and Wildeman 1973; Friedrichs 2007, 2010; Geis 1991, 2016; Kramer and Michalowski 1990; Michalowski 2009; Pontell, Black and Geis 2014; van Erp, Huisman and Vande Walle 2015; White 2011, 2015, 2017). These criminologists have developed a rich research profile on these harmful acts, focusing on white-collar and financial crimes as well as non-financial crimes (e.g., environmental, human rights and state crimes), maintaining Sutherland’s focus on power, status and trust to address these offences. Based on the work of the cited authors, seven types of Crimes of the powerful have been succinctly identified and addressed by Barak (2015): crimes of globalisation, corporate crimes, environmental crimes, white-collar and financial crimes, state crimes, state-corporate crimes and state-routinised crimes.

Although these authors show an increasingly rich focus on Crimes of the powerful research, several scholars have expressed their concern about the lack of studies and knowledge that exist among criminologists regarding these crimes compared to mainstream street crimes (Barak 2015; Lynch, McGurrin and Fenwick 2004; McGurrin, Jarrell, Jahn and Cochrane 2013; Shichor 2009; Snider 2003; Tombs and Whyte 2003b; Whyte 2008). In this respect, some studies aimed to evidence this inequality of power-knowledge within criminological research.

For instance, Tombs and Whyte (2003b) reviewed British journals from 1991 to 2000 with the objective of evidencing the marginalisation of studies on Crimes of the powerful. They show that only 2% of the total articles are focused on state crimes and 3% on corporate crimes. Similarly, Lynch et al. (2004) developed a content analysis of articles in Anglo-Saxon journals published from 1993 to 1997 to observe the underrepresentation of white-collar crime, corporate crime or toxic waste dumping studies. These articles accounted for only 3.6% of more than a thousand analysed studies, with a measured ‘information ratio’ of 1:10 when compared to ordinary street crimes. In addition, Shichor (2009) analyses how the ‘citation analysis’ methods of Cohn and Farrington (1994) confirm the sparse inclusion of white-collar and corporate crime studies in criminology, being considered more as a subfield of the discipline rather than a mainstream subject.

According to Barak (2015) and Tombs and Whyte (2003a), this situation has political, ideological and economic causes. They affirm that access to information, promotion to study these topics, and chances to obtain funding from the governmental and other institutions to focus on Crimes of the powerful is reduced (Tombs and Whyte 2003a). Subsequently, a combination of efforts among threatened groups such as states, corporations and lawyers manage to protect themselves by political and ideological preferences from any scrutiny and risk of loss of reputation or power (Barak 2015).

Another factor is that educational centres are strongly dependent on public and private financing, promoting a ‘commodification of knowledge’ in all disciplines, including Criminology (Tombs and Whyte 2003a: 218). In brief, knowledge is a tradable and exchangeable product in the education market. Thus, when criminologists compete for public grants for research, most of the time they are restricted to the topics of interest determined by the public agenda, which are politically and ideologically defined (Tombs and Whyte 2003b).

The criticism of these authors is essential and constructive for the criminological discipline. However, they fail to notice that the marginalisation of research occurs not only in Anglo-Saxon countries. There is a global inequality of ‘power-knowledge’ in criminology of Crimes of the powerful when observing who produces more research on this topic and where. This represents a new discussion regarding the geopolitics of knowledge and postcolonial theories, which requires a comprehensive understanding of postcolonialism.

Postcolonial theories aim to develop a critical analysis on the present modern/colonial world system that reproduces global power hierarchies through the control of economy, authority, gender, subjectivity and epistemological knowledge (Mignolo 2007). Considering where knowledge is produced and who produces it, the main question examines how particular forms of knowledge affect other places, at what level of influence and how truth is constructed based on the importation/exportation of information, which generally moves from the Global Northern, Anglo-speaking and Western regions to the Global Southern, non-Anglo-speaking and non-Western countries.

Worth mentioning is that these categories of ‘Global North/South’ or ‘Western/non-Western’ speak of a relation of geopolitical zones of the globe, rather than being a label that speaks in or for itself. For postcolonial theorists, these concepts should be used in a reflexive and relative way (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012) as entwined and enmeshed worlds (Blagg and Anthony 2019), not as rigid geographic terms or binary concepts of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’, ‘established’ and ‘emerging’ economies, ‘first’ and ‘third’ world countries (Carrington, Hogg, Scott, Sozzo and Walters 2018).

Bhabha (1994), Fanon (2005), Said (2006) and Spivak (1988) have recognised works on the subject. The latter’s work, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’, criticised Western intellectuals who study non-Western histories and cultures from their comfortable Western positions, arguing that knowledge is never innocent and is used politically to sustain global power relations.

In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), postcolonialism was developed by several authors from the continental perspective through its particular struggle of decolonisation (see Cusicanqui 2012; Escobar 2001; Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2007, 2009; Mignolo and Escobar 2009; Quijano 2007, 2000). LAC intellectuals recognise the invisible power structure that sustains the historical colonial domination through Eurocentric, universalistic and objective schools of thought (Grosfoguel 2011). Consequently, they propose a decolonisation of knowledge and discourse as a more reactive response of postcolonialism to actively recover and promote a regional way of thinking that suits LAC dynamics (Mignolo and Escobar 2009).

The latter relates to Haraway’s (1988) arguments against the academic obsession of objectivity and universality, stating that knowledge is neither complete nor pure, but situated. Postcolonial and decolonial academics in LAC recognised that their knowledge is always situated by class, race, gender, linguistic and geographical features, which impacts the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and the ‘coloniality of power and knowledge’ (Mignolo 2007; Quijano 2007, 2000).

De Sousa Santos (2008, 2009, 2010) agrees that knowledges (with an ‘s’) are situated (Haraway 1988) and criticises Western attempts to develop universal knowledge as validated given the enlightenment, industrialisation, and colonialism have suppressed other epistemological knowledges. Following the decolonisation argument, he recognises that several forms of knowledges sustain different worldviews to the Euro-American-centric visions (e.g., questioning whether the concepts of democracy, state, nature, human rights are absolute universals or not), and to counter this situation, he calls for an ‘ecology of knowledges’ that considers all knowledges (de Sousa Santos 2008, 2010).

Inspired by these theories, some studies have addressed the postcolonial criticism in the social sciences. Most articles are published in journals from the US, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Germany (UNESCO and International Social Science Council 2010), showing an Anglo-Saxon and geopolitical concentration of knowledge. This critique is also seen in management studies (Murphy and Zhu 2012), international relations (Chen, 2011), and sociology and anthropology research (Burawoy 2008; Comaroff and Comaroff 2008, 2012; Connell 2006, 2014). This opens the question: is there is a postcolonial or decolonial criminology?

In the discipline, only a few authors have addressed a postcolonial question in crime (Aas 2012; Agozino 2003, 2004; Blagg and Anthony 2019; Carrington, Hogg and Sozzo 2016; Carrington et al. 2018; Cunneen 2011; Fraser 2013; Kitossa 2012). Agozino (2003, 2004) is the most recognised postcolonial criminologist. He argued that criminology was born at the height of European colonialism, employed by imperialism to build a science with which to control others. It was, in fact, an accomplice of colonial crimes, which until now the discipline has neglected. He contends that criminology and colonialism have been intrinsically related since the former’s origins, and nowadays, this relation is reflected in the way criminology knowledge is being expanded.

After revising non-Western criminology programs, Agozino (2003) observed that most ‘subaltern’ courses did not present indigenous topics or reduced these to poor caricatures of mainstream criminology imported from Western countries. According to him, this produced a lack of criminological imagination in ‘third world’ countries. Hence, he calls for a counter-colonial criminology to analyse social control from an anti-imperialist perspective, focus on colonial crimes and resistance manifestations, and struggle against made-for-export colonial knowledge.

In a similar vein, Aas (2012) coincides with Agozino that the criminological geopolitics of knowledge are unequal by noticing that the Global North and Anglo-Saxon countries are more productive in developing knowledge, and inspired by Haraway’s and postcolonial scholars’ works, she notes the Northern attempts to develop universalistic theories of crime in a context-free approach that affects Southern knowledges. In illustrative terms, she describes the global inequality of criminological knowledge as follows:

More recent work has aimed to open the discipline towards a ‘Southern’ and ‘Decolonised’ Criminology (e.g., Blagg and Anthony 2019; Carrington et al. 2018; Cunneen 2018). According to Carrington et al. (2018: 25), ‘criminology—as a theoretical, empirical and policy project—has substantially overlooked the Global South’, and, hence, Southern Criminology is a project that can fill this void by transnationalising and democratising criminological practice and knowledge ‘from the periphery [...] outside the Global North’. On the other hand, decolonial Criminology aims to achieve a paradigm shift in relation to criminological enquiry, decolonising knowledge and putting indigenous knowledges and empowerment at the centre of research, recognising alternative epistemologies, ontologies, methodologies and places different from the Western knowledge system (Blagg and Anthony 2019).

Lastly, this inequality has been recognised not only in geographic and political categories but also in linguistic terms. Indeed, some authors have come to acknowledge that there is an Anglo-centric world that is dominating knowledge production globally, considering English as the lingua franca or academic global language, not only in the ‘hard’ sciences but also in criminology, law, social science and gender studies (Faraldo-Cabana 2018; Mohanty 1984).

Despite their acknowledgement of the criminological reality, Southern and postcolonial criminologists have not been able to demonstrate the knowledge disparity of criminology’s world map with more concrete results. Further, the LAC region seems to be absent of the postcolonial criminology discourse, despite its rich decolonial reflections in other social science disciplines. Thus, it is important to demonstrate empirically what roles the Global North and Global South, as well as the Anglo and non-Anglo regions, play in the unequal development of Crimes of the powerful studies in the present century, and before delving into the LAC situation.

For this study, a scoping review method (Arksey and O’Malley 2005) was used to develop a comprehensive search for articles of Crimes of the powerful in the 21^stcentury and map where these studies are developed and by whom to measure the level of knowledge-production concentration and influence in the Global North and Global South, particularly in LAC.

Every scoping review requires a search strategy plan (Arksey and O’Malley 2005). To search for Crimes of the powerful, this had to be concisely defined and then translated into keywords. The definitions of the seven types of Crimes of the powerful are shown in Table 1. These definitions are based on Barak’s (2015) framework due to its clarity and useful descriptions of each harmful act.

Category	Description
Crimes of globalisation	Illegal or harmful acts of powerful actors that occur within a global context, many influenced by international financial institutions and are expressions of a globalised and neoliberal economy. For example, colonialism, transnational or multinational crimes.
Corporate crimes	Illegal or harmful acts committed by powerful business actors (corporations or individuals) on behalf of the corporation. For example, tax evasion, transnational corruption, corporate frauds, price-fixing cartels, Ponzi schemes and corporate non-compliance with workers’ health and safety rights.
Environmental crimes	Illegal or harmful acts that affect the environment, climate and ecosystem. For example, climate change crimes, toxic waste and ecocides.
White-collar and financial crimes	Economic crimes committed by workers or entrusted individuals in the context of their occupation that abuse their position and trust for personal profit. For example, financial crimes, money laundering, cybercrime, identity theft and insurance fraud.
State crimes	Illegal or harmful acts committed by government officials in pursuit of their jobs as representatives of the state. For example, state corruption, state frauds, state abuse of power and rights violations.
State-corporate crimes	Illegal or socially injurious actions of public-private partnership that occur when institutions of both sides pursue a goal in direct cooperation. For example, state-corporate corruptions, frauds or human rights violations whenever public and private entities work together.
State-routinised crimes	Harmful acts arising from something that is not necessarily defined as criminal. It is a variation of state crimes or institutionalised corruption when some practices may be illegal but are routinised in public policies, civil and administrative laws. For example, surveillance, lobbying and police or military abuse of power.

These were searched through keywords (‘financial crimes’, ‘state crimes’, ‘eco-crimes’, etc.) in English and Spanish in two databases: Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection, containing the ‘top’ criminological journals globally and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), specialised in LAC articles. Appropriate inclusion and exclusion criteria defined the filters of the studies to be analysed, such as type of document (research articles), time series (2000–2016), language (English and Spanish) and articles that included minimum data such as abstract and authors’ affiliations. The ‘Category’ filter was only applied for the WoS search, particularly the categories of Criminology and Penology. It was not applied for the SciELO search because articles available on this database were rarely categorised by such categories.

After the search was complete, articles were selected. Papers that presented all the inclusion and no exclusion criteria were classified as ‘YES’, those that had at least one exclusion criteria were classified as ‘NO’, and those that were not so clear were labelled as ‘MAYBE’. A second evaluator reviewed the MAYBE articles and helped the researcher to decide whether to include or exclude those articles.

Subsequently, to establish where the research was focused and where the main author’s affiliation was settled, each article’s country and continent were categorised as ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ regions, and according to the main spoken language (‘Anglo’/’Non Anglo’) based on the UN Standard country or area codes for statistical use (M49)^[1] (see Table 8 in Appendix). As previously stated, the categories of Global North and South are theoretically conceived in relative terms, as geopolitical zones that are entwined and enmeshed (Blagg and Anthony 2019; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012). However, methodologically, this paper ended up categorising the Global North and Global South mostly as static, regional geographic segments:

A similar geographic distinction was made in linguistic terms. Most of Global South nations are non-Anglo-speaking countries, except for Oceania, while most of Global North countries are Anglo-speaking countries, with important exceptions in Europe. These particularities are the reason why this research also aimed to analyse the global production of knowledge in linguistic terms (Faraldo-Cabana 2018), providing two main groups:

These categories (Global North/Global South or Anglo-language/non-Anglo-language countries) may imply some conceptual problems by using the taken-for-granted idea of ‘continental’ and ‘nation-state’ as unit of analysis, criticised by decolonialist criminologists (Blagg and Anthony 2019), possibly interpreted as a mechanistic way to compare geopolitical differences without being able to show the extensive heterogeneity that exists within each country and global region (e.g., in Canada or other North American countries^[3]). While this practical division is recognised as a methodological limitation of this study, it is a useful way to evidence the uneven production of knowledge in geographic terms.

Considering the above, 414 articles were selected as YES from a search result of 1,647 articles (using filters) in WoS (a 25% accepted article rate), while 59 articles were selected as YES from a search result of 358 articles (using filters) in SciELO (a 16% accepted article rate).

Based on the selected articles, knowledge-production concentration and knowledge-production influence were measured:

Considering the above, citation analysis was performed on 433 referenced studies used in 14 selected articles from the SciELO search, excluding newspapers, government institution reports, national legislative documents and one article where the authors’ affiliation could not be identified. The selection criteria were to include the seven most-cited articles in LAC related to Crimes of the powerful and another seven with at least two articles of each Crimes of the powerful category.^[4]

In the Criminology discipline, knowledge is also situated (Haraway 1988). However, when knowledge is primarily produced in one place, being historically and globally more validated and proliferated since technological revolutions and the enlightenment periods, other knowledges (with an ‘s’) will inevitably be suppressed, repressed or forgotten (De Sousa Santos, Nunes and Meneses, 2008). Thus, within this historical context, questions such as ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ (Spivak 1988) start to emerge.

In the discipline, knowledge matters and requires multiple sources and diverse perspectives to be correctly developed, assessed and applied in practice. The scoping review search demonstrates that most of the studies are predominantly developed in the Global North, by authors working in the Global North, and in Anglo-language countries, leaving a marginalised space for the production of knowledge in non-Anglo-language countries in the Global South.

The level of knowledge-production concentration in studies on Crimes of the powerful globally was first measured through observing where the authors who develop these studies available in WoS are affiliated with. In a way, this reflects where the geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) is produced. As can be seen in the diffused map (Gastner and Newman 2004) in Figure 1, the authors who study Crimes of the powerful and publish their articles in WoS Core Collection journals are affiliated with institutions mostly settled in specific regions and almost inexistent in others, showing an unequal distribution of knowledge production. The density-equalising technique illustrates that authors are concentrated in the darker-coloured, larger Global North countries of Euro-America, particularly in North America, and are far less concentrated in the lighter-coloured, smaller Global South countries in South America and Southern Africa. Oceania and Asia are in the mid-range—aspects that should be examined in further detail by regional experts. However, some simple inferences could be made based on the literature.

Asia is shown to be the Global South region with the most published studies and authors related to Crimes of the powerful. This may be related to the idea of ‘catching up’ with their Western counterparts’ educational production, as Chen (2011) observed in international relations studies. Conversely, in Oceania, there appears to be no urgent need to catch up due to their structural advantage of language and academic relations within the dominant countries. Anglo-Saxon countries in Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) present higher levels of article publications with recognised criminologists, such as Braithwaite, developing white-collar and powerful studies. Their use of the ‘international language’ (Connell 2014; Murphy and Zhu 2012), along with having key intellectuals on the subject, positions the region almost automatically in the mainstream disciplinary debate (Mignolo 2009).

Figure 1: Resized world map according to the knowledge-production concentration of Crimes of the powerful research articles based on the authors’ affiliation (WoS Core Collection search)

Table 2 presents a synthesis of authors’ regional concentration divided by the Global North and Global South based on the data in Figure 2. Here, it is evident that, in terms of authors who study Crimes of the powerful, there is a high concentration level of knowledge production in the Global North (86%) and a very low level in the Global South (14%).

Table 2: Level of knowledge-production concentration in Crimes of the powerful studies globally according to main authors’ affiliations in the Global North/South regions (WoS Core Collection search, n=414 articles)

When analysing knowledge-production concentration in linguistic terms, the picture is similar. To evidence this, the most common language of the authors’ affiliation country was identified, categorising these countries in dichotomy terms: authors working in an Anglo-language or non-Anglo-language country. Table 3 presents clear trends. The majority of the authors who study Crimes of the powerful and have published articles in WoS Core Collection (76%) developed their studies in Anglo-language countries, whereas only 25% developed their studies in non-Anglo-language countries. Consequently, there is a high concentration of the production of Crimes of the powerful studies in Anglo-Saxon institutions where authors are affiliated developing knowledge and a low concentration in the rest of the world.

Table 3: Level of knowledge-production concentration in Crimes of the powerful studies in linguistic terms (Anglo language/non-Anglo language) according to main authors’ affiliation in WoS Core Collection search (n=414)

A different approach to evidence the knowledge-production concentration is through observing the country where the Crimes of the powerful studies were examined. The diffused map in represents the unequal distribution of knowledge production of Crimes of the powerful based on the region where the studies centred their analyses. Similar to the previous example, Euro-American continents present the larger and darker zone of concentration, followed by Asia, Africa and Oceania, with LAC being the region with the fewest studies.

(*)The numbers do not coincide with the total number of articles (414) because many articles had several countries where the research was focused/developed.

Figure 2: Resized world map according to the knowledge-production concentration of Crimes of the powerful research articles according to which region the studies were focused/developed (WoS Core Collection search) (N=475)(*)

Based on Figure 2, Table 4 provides an overview of the knowledge-production concentration in terms of whether the studies are mostly developed in Global North or South regions. This illustrates what appears to be a recurrent theme: a high knowledge-production concentration level in the North (71%) and a low concentration level in the South (29%).

Table 4: Level of knowledge-production concentration in Crimes of the powerful studies globally according to where the studies are focused or developed (WoS Core Collection search, n=475 articles)(*)

(*)The numbers do not coincide with the total number of articles (414) because many articles had several countries where the research was focused/developed.

Lastly, a similar analysis was conducted based on the main language of the country in which Crimes of the powerful cases were studied. Table 5 summarises the amount of studies developed in Anglo-language and non-Anglo-language countries. There is a high knowledge-production concentration level in Anglo-language countries (60%) and a low but not insignificant concentration level in non-Anglo-language countries (40%). Maybe not as high as expected for some authors (Faraldo-Cabana 2018), knowledge is dominated, though not completely, in Anglo-linguistic terms. Nevertheless, this is a crucial barrier for the decolonising project of the discipline that aims to reinforce other languages and epistemologies.

Table 5: Level of knowledge-production concentration in Crimes of the powerful studies in linguistic terms (Anglo language/non-Anglo language) according to studied country’s main language in WoS Core Collection search (n=441) (*)

(*)The numbers do not coincide with the total number of articles (414) because many articles had several countries where the research was focused/developed.

In synthesis, the global search for studies in the WoS Core Collection shows that there is a high concentration level of knowledge production (i.e., more than 50%) of criminology articles related to Crimes of the powerful in the Global North and Anglo-language countries related to the authors’ affiliation region and where the studies were mainly developed.^[5] This demonstrates a geographic and linguistic domination of the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Dussel 1977) and evidences the persistent ‘coloniality of knowledge and power’ (Blagg and Anthony 2019; Mignolo and Escobar 2009; Quijano 2007) in Criminology in the present century. The highest production of knowledge in these terms can be seen in the US and Canada (North America) followed by Europe.

The latter could be less problematic when considering Euro-American scholars and institutions have easier access to study Euro-American Crimes of the powerful. They present a more mature criminological discipline and hence could develop more contingent and better-quality studies of the Crimes of the powerful of their localities. However, the issue becomes more critical when considering that today’s reality is a globalised world and transnational networks in which harmful acts can and often do transcend national borders, affect other spaces and produce new opportunities in which powerful wrongdoing can occur persistently (Friedrichs 2007, 2010, 2015; Friedrichs and Friedrichs 2002). As Carrington et al. (2018) state, the Global North and South are globally interconnected in different ways and with multiple effects, and so, criminological research, theories and policies should be analysed as processes, interactions and networks between them. This is exemplified in environmental crimes, economic crises, transnational corporate crimes, colonial crimes and other harmful acts which, according to several authors, predominantly originate from the ‘respectable’ Global North actors, but the Global South and subaltern regions suffer the consequences (Aas 2012; Agozino 2004; Comaroff and Comaroff 2008, 2012). In this context, it is important to understand that Southern experiences could provide significant insights into global and local criminological problems, currently bypassed by the dominant Northern lenses. As De Souza Santos (2008) states, ‘there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice’.

Thus, the global inequality of knowledge production has blinding effects when contextual particularities are omitted in Crimes of the powerful studies. Universalistic theories of crime, such as the ‘General theory of crime’ (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1989) or the ‘General strain theory’ (Agnew, Piquero and Cullen 2009), among others, have attempted to analyse and explain Crimes of the powerful in universal terms. Also, epistemological and methodological assumptions have historically been imported and should now be critically decolonised in crimes of powerful studies, similar to Blagg and Anthony’s (2019: 22–23) proposal for indigenous topics. Similar to Connell’s (2006) criticisms about Northern social theorists, these theories exemplify how criminologists also tend to make universal statements and read their theories from the centre, uncritically questioning if their explanations are applicable to Southern places. These studies are only developed in North America or Europe, with limited exceptions in Asia by scholars working in the US (e.g., Moon, McCluskey and McCluskey 2010). In this sense, it is crucial to ask whether subaltern voices could apply these theories in Southern and non-Anglo-language conditions to see how universal these paradigms really are. The context-free nature of Northern social theory (Aas 2012) builds a distorted universalism that risks ignoring that Crimes of the powerful knowledges are, fundamentally, situated (Haraway 1988; de Sousa Santos 2008).

In a world where coloniality of power and knowledge is still the general form of domination (Quijano 2007), there is a struggle to achieve the ‘ecology of knowledges’ (de Sousa Santos 2009). In criminology, some have advocated to decolonise and relocate criminology’s world map with a Southern centre, though with limited concrete results (Aas 2012; Agozino 2003, 2004; Blagg and Anthony 2019; Carrington et al. 2016; Carrington et al. 2018; Cunneen 2011; Fraser 2013; Kitossa 2012).

To decolonise and achieve ecology of knowledges, it is important to acknowledge whether there is a strong influence of knowledge related to Crimes of the powerful from the Global North and Anglo-Saxon countries over Southern regions, such as in LAC. According to del Olmo (1999), since its emergence in the region, LAC Criminology lacks originality. The discipline was born through an importation of knowledge from Europe and North America since the 1880s, from the Italian positivist school to social defence ideals, replicating what Agozino (2004) described in the African context: promising criminology, but lacking a local criminological imagination.

Thinking in the LAC context, critical, situated and postcolonial questions could be addressed in order to contribute theoretical and empirical studies on Crimes of the powerful by LAC scholars. For instance, are the conceptions of ‘state’ (e.g., welfare state) or ‘human rights’ universal principles applicable in Southern and LAC contexts, or are these Euro-American notions applicable mostly to Northern countries (de Sousa Santos 2009, 2010)? Was the importation of Northern models such as the social defence successful, or was it in fact an application of a ‘defence’ rather than ‘social’ model, leaving behind the expensive rehabilitation and intervention programs that social defence ideals called for (Lippens 2004: 310)? What is the present role of the US and other Northern countries in LAC state crimes, abuse of power, war on drugs and violence generated? Even more, what is the regional analysis on the ‘colonial crimes’ highlighted by Agozino (2003, 2004) and others?

LAC critical criminology once focused on some of these questions during the 1970s and 1980s (Aniyar de Castro 1987; Antony 1984; del Olmo 1981; Shank and Dodd 1986, 1987). However, not much critical criminology seems to be left nowadays to keep addressing these questions or develop LAC Criminology (Gabaldón 2010). Birkbeck (1983) noted that LAC Criminology did show promising attempts to develop a regional theory of criminology, but that some scientific and theoretical issues should be addressed first to reach this. Also, he noted that even the rejections of previous Northern theories were influenced by other Euro-American ones (e.g., Marxism and critical criminology). Despite these limitations, he argued that theory importation is not always bad, but it is an obligation of the Latin American criminologists to ‘go beyond the monopoly of the production of criminological theories by criminologists in Western Europe and North America, which implicitly leads to the crystallization of certain intellectual interests and conceptions of the criminological problematic’ (Birkbeck 1983: 26).

To evidence this influence of criminological knowledge in more concrete terms, the present article performed a citation analysis of 433 references used in 14 selected articles focused on LAC Crimes of the powerful cases to discover the ‘scholarly’ influence in those LAC studies. The LAC countries presented the lowest levels of published articles compared to the other Southern nations. As such, it is interesting to examine the level of influence Global Northern and Anglo-language countries had on the LAC studies on Crimes of the powerful.

Figure 3 summarises the analysis of knowledge-production influence in terms of the reference authors’ affiliations (continents) in LAC Crimes of the powerful studies. The results show that the LAC region presents an exceptional concentration of self-influence, with 45% of the reference authors working in that region, followed by North America (mostly the US) and then Europe (mostly Spain).

Source: Own elaboration based on references of 14 articles from SciELO search.

Figure 3: Knowledge-production influence in LAC research articles related to Crimes of the powerful (SciELO search) according to reference authors’ affiliation regions (n=433)

When the analysis is reconceptualised based on the Global North and Global South regions, the picture changes. Based on the same 433 references used in the citation analysis, it can be seen in Table 6 that the Global North has a high level of knowledge-production influence with more than half of the authors coming to and working in Northern Hemisphere countries. Conversely, despite LAC’s high level of self-influence, even when combined with other Southern regions, their knowledge-production influence is relatively lower compared to that of the Global North.

Table 6: Level of knowledge-production influence in Crimes of the powerful studies in LAC according to the referenced authors’ affiliation countries (SciELO search, 14 articles, n=433 references)

The last analysis is a reformulation of what has been shown above, albeit in linguistic terms, observing the data according to whether the authors of the references are affiliated with Anglo-language or non-Anglo-language countries. As can be seen in Table 7, there is a predominance of knowledge-production influence moving from non-Anglo-language countries to LAC studies of Crimes of the powerful. Anglo-language countries account for 34% of the influence over knowledge production in LAC studies of Crimes of the powerful, with 66% of the influence coming from non-Anglo-language countries. Despite the large difference, it is significant that one-third of the referenced works are from Anglo-language countries. There are two main reasons behind these results. First, the LAC region is predominantly non-Anglo language (consisting of mostly Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries). Second, the high level of knowledge-production influence coming from non-Anglo-language European countries such as Spain, Italy and Germany.

Table 7: Level of knowledge-production influence in Crimes of the powerful studies in LAC according to the referenced authors’ affiliation country language (SciELO search, 14 articles, n=433 references).

In summary, the identified level of influence from Northern and Anglo-language countries in LAC studies on Crimes of the powerful is a decisive result. Citation analysis focused on the LAC studies’ references shows that despite a high level of referencing of LAC scholars (45%), there remains a predominant influence of scholars from the Global North, with more than 50% of cited authors coming from Euro-American countries. Conversely, the map changes when analysing this in linguistic terms. Two-thirds of the referenced authors come from non-Anglo-language countries, a result that can be explained by the dominant languages in those regions (Spanish and Portuguese). Nevertheless, it is important to notice that among the 433 referenced authors analysed, 34% represent the influence of Anglo-language countries.

In this vein, this article opens new questions about why LAC Criminology presents such low productivity of academic articles published in Crimes of the powerful and why they are so influenced by foreign rather than local scholars. Some would argue this relates to structural particularities of the LAC region. Since colonisation, the predominant type of legislation in the region has been based on the codified tradition of Roman law, which has determined, on some level, a strong influence from the Italian, German and Spanish schools of penology and criminology (Zaffaroni 1980). Hence, for the Latin context, it makes sense that the most influential academics of criminology, and in particular, in research on Crimes of the powerful are academics from non-Anglo-language and Global North countries. Further, criminology is a marginal career in the region, and the majority of those who have promoted it in the past few decades are penologists and lawyers (Neuman 1980; Gabaldón 2010; Zaffaroni 1980). Despite that the discipline is growing, it is still far from being recognised as a social science, which has consequently determined the low level of academic practice in this area. In addition, when compared to North American Criminology, LAC academics are anchored in public institutions, rather than in academic research centres, with a dedication to social change and the moral denunciation of oppressive orders, rather than questioning how to improve criminological thinking and local knowledge (Gabaldón 2010). Related to this point, it could be argued that LAC criminologists have only recently begun asking about the need for a Southern (Carrington et al. 2018) and decolonial knowledge (Blagg and Anthony 2019) of the discipline.

Concerns over the limited scope and knowledge on white-collar, corporate and ‘powerful’ actors’ crimes compared to crimes of the powerless have been stated and evidenced by several scholars (Barak 2015; Lynch et al. 2004; McGurrin et al. 2013; Shichor 2009; Snider 2003; Tombs and Whyte 2003a). However, none of these authors has questioned the marginalisation of the research of Crimes of the powerful beyond English-speaking and Euro-American countries. The present study filled this knowledge gap by empirically evidencing, through a scoping review and citation analysis method focused on the WoS Core Collection and SciELO databases, the extent to which academic research from the Global North and Anglo-language countries dominates the knowledge production in criminology of Crimes of the powerful and affects Southern regions such as LAC.

Attempting to draw a wall map of criminology’s work (Aas 2012), this research shows that the knowledge in Crimes of the powerful is highly biased and unequal when considering the geographic locations and linguistic features of the studies. The Global North and Anglo-language countries concentrate the production of knowledge and, thus, have a privileged position in the geopolitics of knowledge (Dussel 1977) to develop theory, discourse and methods related to Crimes of the powerful, whereas the Global South remains weak in these terms. Oceania and Asia showed a far higher production of articles compared to other Southern regions. Nevertheless, thus far in the 21^st century, the global trend is clear.

The present research employed the categories of the Global North and South in relative and relational terms. Beyond conceiving these regions as two separate categories defined a priori, this study attempted to show the relationship between the Global North and South, focusing on LAC. The results showed that a high level of knowledge-production influence presently exists from Global Northern authors to the Southern region, particularly in linguistic terms.

The key contribution of this research is to open new discussions in criminology presenting a simple—and maybe obvious—reality: there is a systematic inequality, linguistically and geographically, of the production of knowledge in the criminology of Crimes of the powerful, which the discipline agenda should address.

However, some research limitations need to be recognised. First, the method strategy was restricted to specific inclusion criteria, languages, years, databases and keywords that limited the incorporation of all the Crimes of the powerful studies in the world. More languages, regions and databases could be used to overcome this limitation. Second, the use of a mechanistic division of the Global North and Global South and of Anglo-language and non-Anglo-language countries based on geographical definitions of production limited the possibility to compare sub-national realities or other more complex definitions of what is a Global North and South settlement. This could also be overcome in future research.

As part of the concluding thoughts, this study calls for a postcolonial (Agozino 2003, 2004), decolonial (Blagg and Anthony 2019) and southernised criminology (Carrington et al. 2018) that changes the altered geography of knowledge in the criminological discipline, particularly in Crimes of the powerful. The aim is to go beyond Global Northern perspectives and start considering knowledges, theories and criminal practices situated in Global Southern and non-Anglo-language countries. Northern criminologists could learn from other experiences outside Europe and the US, and Southern criminologists could widen their lenses to other Southern regions as well as to indigenous knowledges. Therefore, the call is to expand the criminological geography of reasoning, as Mignolo (2009) would put it, from North to South, Centre to Periphery and West to East, to someday overcome these divisionary and hierarchical categories.

Correspondence: Amalia Valdés-Riesco, Researcher at Centro de Estudios Justicia y Sociedad, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile. Email: avaldes4@uc.cl

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Global North/Global South	Continent	Sub group	Anglo-Saxon Country/ Non-Anglo Saxon country	Countries
Global South	Africa	Northern Africa	Non-Anglo Saxon	Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Western Sahara
		[Sub-Saharan] Eastern Africa	Non-Anglo Saxon	British Indian Ocean Territory, Burundi, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, French Southern Territories, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Réunion, Rwanda, Seychelles, Somalia South Sudan, Uganda, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
		[Sub-Saharan] Middle Africa	Non-Anglo Saxon	Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sao Tome and Principe
		[Sub-Saharan] Southern Africa	Anglo-Saxon	South Africa
		[Sub-Saharan] Southern Africa	Non-Anglo Saxon	Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland
		[Sub-Saharan] Western Africa	Non-Anglo Saxon	Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côted'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Togo
Global South	Americas	Latin America and the Caribbean	Non-Anglo Saxon	Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Curaçao, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Martin (French Part), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Sint Maarten (Dutch part), Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, United States Virgin Islands, Belize, Costa Rica El Salvador, Guatemala Honduras, Mexico Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Bolivia (Plurinational State of), Bouvet Island, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)
Global North	Americas	North America	Anglo-Saxon	Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, United States of America
Global South	Antarctica	Antarctica	Non-Anglo Saxon	Antarctica
Global South	Asia	Eastern Asia	Non-Anglo Saxon	China, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Macao Special Administrative Region, Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Japan, Mongolia, Republic of Korea
		South-eastern Asia	Non-Anglo Saxon	Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia. Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Viet Nam
		Southern Asia	Non-Anglo Saxon	Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
		Western Asia	Non-Anglo Saxon	Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cyprus, Georgia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, State of Palestine, Turkey, Syrian Arab Republic, United Arab Emirates, Yemen
Global North	Europe	Eastern Europe	Non-Anglo Saxon	Belarus, Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Ukraine
		Northern Europe	Non-Anglo Saxon	Aland Islands, Guernsey, Jersey, Sark, Denmark, Estonia, Faroe Islands Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Svalbard and Jan Mayen Island, Sweden
		Northern Europe	Anglo-Saxon	Ireland, Isle of Man, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
		Southern Europe	Non-Anglo Saxon	Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Gibraltar Greece, Holy See, Italy, Malta Montenegro, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia
		Western Europe	Non-Anglo Saxon	Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Switzerland
Global South	Oceania	Australia and New Zealand	Non-Anglo Saxon	Christmas Island Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Norfolk Island
		Australia and New Zealand	Anglo-Saxon	Australia, New Zealand
		Melanesia	Non-Anglo Saxon	Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu
		Micronesia	Non-Anglo Saxon	Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands Micronesia (Federated States of) Nauru, Northern Mariana Islands Palau, United States Minor Outlying Islands
		Polynesia	Non-Anglo Saxon	American Samoa, Cook Islands French Polynesia, Niue, Pitcairn, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna Islands

^[2] The Antarctic is excluded from this article’s analysis because there are no studies developed there (to date).

^[3] Greenland is an important example to clarify. Despite it is an autonomous territory of Denmark, in this study it is analysed as an area of Northern America, because it is grouped like that in the UN Geographic regions used for statistical means (M49).

^[4] ‘Most-cited’ refers to those articles that the SciELO database measured to have more ‘Total cites’, which includes the Web of Science Core Collection, the BIOSIS Citation Index, the Chinese Science Citation Database and the SciELO Citation Index. These were less than expected. Therefore, the researcher conducted a complementary selection to analyse at least two studies of each Crime of the Powerful category.

^[5] Nonetheless, these results should be carefully analysed. As explained in the Methodological Design section, the categorisation of Global North and Global South had to be reduced into binary geographic and linguistic segments, and only at a regional level, without being able to identify national or sub-national particularities.

Global region	Knowledge-production concentration level
Global North (North America and Europe)	355 (86%) HIGH
Global South (Africa, Asia, LAC and Oceania)	59 (14%) LOW
Total	414 (100%)

Main language of authors’ affiliation countries	Knowledge-production concentration level
Anglo-language country	313 (76%) HIGH
Non-Anglo-language country	102 (25%) LOW
Total	414 100%

Global region	Knowledge-production concentration level
Global North (North America and Europe)	337 (71%) HIGH
Global South (Africa, Asia, LAC and Oceania)	138 (29%) LOW
Total	475 (100%)

Main language of country studied	Knowledge-production concentration level
Anglo-Saxon Language country	265 (60%) HIGH
Non-Anglo Language country	176 (40%) LOW
Total	441 (100%)

Global region of referenced authors’ affiliations	Knowledge-production influence level
Global North (North America and Europe)	222 (51%) HIGH
Global South (Africa, Asia, LAC and Oceania)	211 (49%) MEDIUM
Total	433 (100%)

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Re-visiting Crimes of the Powerful through a Postcolonial Perspective
Power, Knowledge and Crimes of the Powerful

Correspondence: Amalia Valdés-Riesco, Researcher at Centro de Estudios Justicia y Sociedad, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile. Email: avaldes4@uc.cl

References

Language of referenced authors’ affiliation countries	Knowledge-production influence level
Anglo-language country	149 (34%) LOW
Non-Anglo-language country	284 (66%) HIGH
Total	433 (100%)

International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy

Re-visiting Crimes of the Powerful through a Postcolonial PerspectivePower, Knowledge and Crimes of the Powerful

Correspondence: Amalia Valdés-Riesco, Researcher at Centro de Estudios Justicia y Sociedad, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile. Email: avaldes4@uc.cl

References

Re-visiting Crimes of the Powerful through a Postcolonial Perspective
Power, Knowledge and Crimes of the Powerful