Abstract
Human rights undertakings by governments seldom translate seamlessly into human rights compliance. In the worst-case scenario, governments may have little or no intention of upholding human rights standards to which they have publicly committed and can use their ratification of international instruments and domestic implementation as a veneer to obscure or legitimise continuing abuses. Even in the best-case scenario, local implementation of international human rights agreements may be patchy, overlook the needs of diverse population groups or give rise to unforeseen consequences. In this opening chapter, the editors set out the variety of ways in which applied, theoretically informed criminological research can help to identify systemic human rights abuses and advance a critical human rights agenda and introduce readers to the critiques and strategies set out in the substantive chapters.
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Keywords
- Critical human rights
- Critical criminology
- Human rights discourse
- Human rights practice
- Human rights compliance
Criminology and Human Rights
Human rights undertakings by governments seldom translate seamlessly into human rights compliance. In the worst-case scenario, governments may have little or no intention of upholding human rights standards to which they have publicly committed and can use their ratification of international instruments and domestic implementation as a veneer to obscure or even legitimise continuing abuses. Even in the best-case scenario, local implementation of international human rights agreements may be patchy, overlook the needs of diverse population groups or give rise to unforeseen consequences. The criminal justice system and related areas of crime, harm and law enforcement are key sites for the exercise and contestation of state-corporate and personal power. Critical criminological research, therefore, has a significant role to play in identifying whether state and state-corporate power is exercised in ways that align with human rights law and principles, and, more fundamentally, whether human rights undertakings reflect the best interests of the populations they purport to protect. And yet, the discipline as a whole has been slow to advance this critical agenda.1
The aim of this edited collection is to articulate a future direction for research at the nexus of criminology and human rights by bringing together experts from different subject areas who, while they may be sceptical about certain aspects of human rights theory, law or practice, share an interest in realising many of the objectives set out in human rights instruments. As we have argued elsewhere (Weber et al. 2014, p. 83), ‘[c]riminologists who engage actively with human rights, while they may vary in many other respects, all see the pursuit of human wellbeing rather than the smooth functioning of state institutions as the key objective of criminological enquiry’.
It is now more than half a century since US scholars Schwendinger and Schwendinger (1970, p. 77) urged criminologists to ‘redefine themselves, no longer to be the defenders of order, but rather the defenders of human rights’. This began what Stanley (2011, p. 168) calls a ‘criminological shift’ in some parts of the discipline that directed attention towards the international, and purportedly universal, norms of human rights. This shift has included sustained questioning of how crime is defined and constructed by state actors, and critiquing of the role of governments as both protectors and violators of human rights. Criminological scholarship in this vein has sometimes applied the language and concepts of human rights (Cohen 1993), but has also developed through the lens of social harms and social justice (Canning and Tombs 2021) and the emergence of the cognate study of state and state-corporate crime (Michalowski and Kramer 2006; Chambliss and Michalowski 2010; Stanley and McCulloch 2012). Whatever the focus, the primary contribution for human rights conscious criminologists has been overwhelmingly empirical, intended to ‘unpack the involvement of various powerful actors in violations’ (Stanley 2011, p. 175).
These steps towards a criminology with a critical perspective on the state have coincided with a growing preoccupation with transnational crime and the operation of power on a global scale. As Stanley (2011, p. 176) has noted, this requires moving away from ‘a strict individualist model of criminal responsibility to consider the collaborative power arrangements that exist at local, national and global levels’. This, in turn, opens the way for new normative frameworks, as we have argued previously: ‘A perspective that stretches beyond the narrow confines of state-based law and criminal justice institutions is needed to address this extra-territorial research agenda, and criminologists are turning increasingly to human rights to provide a supra-national normative framework’ (Weber et al. 2014, p. 82). A critical, human rights-centred criminology will not take the normative claims of governments at face value, but will seek to uncover where the language, and sometimes the practice, of human rights is deployed to sustain global inequalities. For example, Katja Franko (2019) has argued that European governments have sought to maintain an illusory commitment to human rights, while exercising harsh exclusionary controls over those they define as ‘crimmigrant others’, thereby sustaining global inequalities.
Empirical criminological research holds the promise of grounding otherwise abstract notions of human rights in practice; extending our understanding of the operation of human rights in particular contexts, taking into consideration broader relations of power; and supporting calls for the accountable exercise of power (Marmo and Fishwick 2022). Overall, much of what has been published at the nexus of criminology and human rights could be said to reflect a concern with developing a criminology that works for human rights, but not necessarily through them. In other words, while legal scholars may focus on the international human rights framework itself as a process for achieving change, the focus for critical criminologists is generally on achieving human rights goals as an outcome, by revealing the failure of governments and other actors to meet these standards in practice and drawing on a wider range of political, legal and social interventions to ameliorate and prevent them. The knowledge produced by a human rights-centred criminology therefore supplements the focus on legal process often adopted by scholars of international law.
In a previous publication (Weber et al. 2014, p. 3), we invited criminologists to engage more closely and critically with the actual content and practice of human rights and avoid using the term merely as a slogan. This is because, in order to undertake applied research that defends human rights, it is important to have a sound understanding of the substance of international human rights law: ‘To defend human rights, criminologists must be able to sufficiently identify the violations of these rights – by whom and against whom; how and why’ (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1970, p. 146). Yet, many criminology undergraduate and postgraduate studies worldwide do not offer an adequate education in human rights. And, on the increasing occasions when human rights are invoked in academic writings, this is mostly cursory. This is inadequate to implement—or even critique—human rights concepts and practices in an adaptable and effective way, since they provide key advocacy tools, shared across cognate disciplines and political institutions and processes (Marmo and Fishwick 2022).
Just as there are many approaches to criminological scholarship, there are contrasting perspectives that can be taken to the study of human rights. Dembour (2012) has identified four schools of human rights thinking which she sets out as ‘ideal types’. What she calls the natural school takes universal human rights as a ‘given’, embodied in law without the need for further justification, and by definition universal. In contrast, the deliberative school of thought is more mindful of the contingent and socially constructed nature of human rights, while recognising the potential to achieve universality in human rights law through consensus building. The protest school depicts the contest over human rights in more combative terms, recognising that extant human rights law often falls short of alleviating human suffering and must therefore be a site of perpetual political struggle. Most sceptical of all is the discursive school which sees the supposed universality of human rights as a pretence that enables governments and other authorities to couch their actions in human rights language, irrespective of their compliance with human rights law. Dembour describes this position as being ‘nihilistic’ with respect to human rights.
We have previously attempted to map these contrasting perspectives onto the discipline of criminology, noting that individual criminologists or schools of criminological thought might combine elements of more than one (Weber et al. 2014). Broadly speaking, we speculated that more legalistic approaches and perhaps positivist empirical approaches such as crime science, might approximate a natural position that applied human rights norms without seeking to problematise them. We proposed that branches of applied criminology that aspire to consensus building such as peacekeeping criminology, transitional and restorative justice might share at least some methodological similarities with the deliberative human rights school, drawing on human rights norms and concepts as a lingua franca in community deliberations over standard setting. Critical criminologists who are preoccupied with the critique of power in relation to crimes of the powerful, state crimes, colonialism and other systemic forms of discrimination and oppression might feel most at home in the protest school, deploying human rights claims as demands for accountability. While Foucauldian, radical feminist, and possibly Marxist scholars might be the most inclined to dismiss human rights norms as merely discursive tools, albeit for quite different reasons. Despite these disparities, we concluded that ‘[h]uman rights frameworks can potentially be accommodated within any criminological approach that eschews empiricism and the purely technical approaches to criminal justice and crime control associated with much of mainstream criminology’ (Weber et al. 2014, p. 75).
One fundamental tension that must be acknowledged when seeking to integrate human rights and criminology is the difficulty of squaring human rights concepts with critical structural analysis. As early as 1970, Schwendinger and Schwendinger called for both individuals and systems that deny the basic human rights essential for human flourishing to be identified as criminal (cited in Weber et al. 2014, p. 77). However, human rights frameworks on their own are often viewed as too individualistic and too focused on civil and political rights to address the full range of structural harms and inequalities that threaten human flourishing:
Human rights discourse is useful in terms of couching claims as agreed ‘social wrongs’ (Smart 1989: 143); however, if we want to challenge the wider harms that cause death and suffering, we sometimes need to look beyond the current hierarchy of human rights that elevates individualism and legal responses. Research has to understand local and personal ‘troubles’ in terms of histories, ideologies, relations and structures at a global level. (Stanley 2011, p. 177)
This is a call for an active engagement with social, economic and cultural rights, alongside the incorporation of structural frameworks, such as counter-colonialism, feminism, critical race theory or anti-capitalism. This follows from our earlier writing on criminology and human rights where we noted that:
Scholars working from radical perspectives often advocate fundamental structural change that goes beyond the enforcement of minimum standards set out in human rights instruments, reject the abstraction and assertions of universalism of orthodox conceptions of human rights, and consider that existing human rights institutions are incapable of delivering on social justice goals in the face of state imperialism and growing corporate power. (Weber et al. 2014, p. 78)
Despite legitimate misgivings about the ability of human rights instruments to address structurally entrenched harms, Murphy and Whitty (2013, p. 574), in an assessment of criminological engagement with human rights conducted a decade ago, noted that at least some strands of critical criminology have recognised rights pragmatically as ‘potential tools’ for working towards broader social justice goals. Even criminologists who are mindful of the discursive potential of human rights to obfuscate state responsibility and legitimate harmful state or corporate practices, may choose not to abandon reference to human rights entirely, but rather to use human rights frameworks as a reference point within broader analyses that integrate multiple critical perspectives to hold governments to account. As Stanley (2011, p. 189) concludes: ‘Criminology, therefore, needs to be attentive to the ways in which civil and political human rights approaches, by powerful nations and bodies, can be used as a cover to pursue individual geographic, political, social or economic interests’.
Rationale for Collection: New Thinking and Future Research Agenda for a Human Rights Centred Criminology
New Thinking About Criminology and Human Rights
Contributors to this volume display varying dispositions towards human rights that reflect the diverse ‘schools’ of human rights thinking outlined above. Not surprisingly, given their positioning as critical criminologists, a predilection for the more politicised (protest) and sceptical (discursive) approaches, and often a combination of the two, is readily apparent. As Dembour herself noted, individuals may align themselves strategically—whether consciously or otherwise—with elements of more than one of the ideal types, depending on the purpose of their analysis. We contend that there is no inherent contradiction, for example, in deploying extant human rights norms as an analytical tool to compare with actual criminal justice practice (adopting elements of a deliberative or protest position viz-a-viz human rights), while also pointing out the state capture of human rights discourse to legitimate abusive practices and identifying shortcomings in the construction of the human rights framework itself.
The contributions vary in the extent to which they engage with the specific content of human rights instruments and concepts, but together they span a range of civil, political, social and economic rights from the right to life and personal integrity, to protest, to health and an adequate standard of living, to freedom of identity and expression and the right to be free from arbitrary detention and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. This breadth, and the focus on human rights violations arising from structural harms, acknowledges that human beings may experience a ‘continuum of violations’, as was argued by Stanley (2011) more than a decade ago. Because of this breadth of vision, all contributors integrate critical analytical frameworks into their human rights discussions. For some authors, their contribution represents a relatively new engagement with human rights law and concepts, while for others it is the culmination of many years of scholarship at the nexus of criminology and human rights. In each case, their chapters present new and critical thinking that enriches our understanding of both the value and limits of human rights in real-world contexts, while extending the boundaries of the criminology discipline.
The volume opens with a thought-provoking contribution by Elizabeth Stanley who reflects on the challenges of developing a criminology for human rights, building on her earlier work (Stanley 2011). She opens provocatively with the observation that ‘[i]t can sometimes be hard to get behind human rights’, noting that political, economic and technological structures globally, including institutions charged with managing crime and criminal justice, are organised in ways that actively promote mass human rights abuses. This is facilitated by processes of normalisation and distancing that disguise underlying systems of inequality and sustained by ineffectual accountability mechanisms in systems that affirm the power and primacy of the state. But rather than abandon any engagement with human rights, Stanley sees a crucial role for criminologists—discussed further in the next section—as human rights champions.
In her chapter on ‘governing through rights’, socio-legal scholar Claire Hamilton notes the ease with which human rights regimes have accommodated authoritarian securitisation measures following the 9/11 terror attacks, while at the same time claiming to ‘emancipate and protect often vulnerable lives’. Adopting a Foucauldian lens, she presents two security case studies operating at the international and national level, respectively, in which human rights became a legitimising force to pursue draconian policies in the name of national and global security. Despite this excoriating critique of human rights practice, Hamilton maintains that human rights law cannot be dismissed as entirely ineffectual or as merely a legitimation device but has also been successfully applied to force some constraints on sweeping security laws in the United Kingdom.
Will Jackson’s chapter is a call to radically overhaul policing research, much of which continues to be conducted with and for police. Jackson charts major milestones in the public exposure of abuses of power by UK police, while noting that relationships between police organisations and mainstream policing researchers have become closer over the same period, often diminishing the critical edge of the research. Jackson argues that human rights focused criminologists should conduct research on, rather than for police. He recounts an empirical case study on the policing of protest, where a decision was taken to adopt a ‘one-sided approach’ in order to gain the trust of heavily policed protest groups. This uncovered many violations of the Human Rights Act 1998 [UK] that had gone unreported in previous, police-orientated research.
Next, Katja Franko examines the right to life as it applies, or more often does not, to the deaths of border crossers at the external borders of Europe. She notes that scant scholarly attention has been paid to this fundamental right with most work in criminology being centred on the use of the death penalty. She depicts borderlands as places where migrants’ rights come into direct conflict with the border control objectives and sovereign violence of states while offering ideal conditions for the avoidance of responsibility. For one thing, migrant status decreases the capacity for border crossers to be seen as the bearers of rights. As a consequence, the protection of ‘precarious life’ in Europe has typically been framed as a humanitarian issue, whereby offering assistance is considered to be an act of grace.
Andriani Fili and Mary Bosworth maintain a focus on the particular difficulty of securing the rights of migrants. Despite a damning record of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in immigration detention facilities, they argue that Greek authorities have used the often ‘timid’ and ‘reformist’ reports of human rights agencies, including government funded monitoring bodies, as ‘discursive legitimation’ of their abusive practices. Drawing on interviews with human rights defenders, lawyers and activists, and with reference to specific human rights instruments such as OPCAT, the authors show how human rights protections have proved ineffective in moderating the state’s prerogative to control its borders, reflecting a lesser degree of human rights protection for non-citizens and the incapacity of human rights mechanisms to effect systemic change.
Silvana Tapia Tapia shines a light on carceral violence in Ecuador, using an abolitionist and post-colonial lens to expose what she calls ‘human rights penality’ in government responses to violence against women. Whereas many authors direct their critique to governments who use human rights discourse as a camouflage for abusive practices, her critique of human rights is more fundamental. She sees the international human rights system, derived from Western liberal thought, as playing a facilitating role within an ongoing colonial paradigm that directly supports carceral violence. This generates false assumptions that prisons can be made human rights compliant, often displacing non-carceral, pre-colonial systems and consistently failing to deter or reform perpetrators or meet the needs of survivors.
Continuing with a critique of human rights as legitimising Western ideology, Pablo Ciocchini and Joe Greener reflect on the power dichotomy of human rights in the Global South. While human rights could be used to address state and state-corporate harm, they are in fact implemented to maintain the status quo. Therefore, these authors argue, human rights are used to maintain the current structures of power. They claim that the principle of human rights universality is undermined at local-operational level, because the higher-level infrastructure of human rights is brought to the local level via a dispersed system of accountability. This implements a selective inclusion of what is and what is not human rights abuse and confines human rights interventions to ad-hoc mitigation or prevention of crisis, rather than long-term sustainable societal transformation.
Along similar lines, the chapter by Danielle Watson, Julie Berg and Lamese Laponi analyses the issues linked to a Western-centric interpretation of ‘access to justice’. Despite this principle being recognised as a fundamental human right almost 85 years ago with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its definition and frameworks are limited, since the current interpretation of ‘access to justice’ is not sufficiently inclusive of justice mechanisms beyond Western-centric systems or other broadly accepted, and in many cases colonised, systems. In turn, this excludes a comprehensive approach to access to justice, forcing other systems to either conform or to be not accepted or even to be negated to the point of being pathologised for being non-state and plural systems.
As part of this reflection, Stella Black, David Burnside, Jessica Hastings and Katey Thom point out that Indigenous people are those who are ‘apprehended, arrested, incarcerated, institutionalised or in rehabilitation or recovery’, in highest proportion. They reaffirm Māori rights are fundamental human rights, as recognised in te Titiri o Waitangi [Treaty of Waitangi], and by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They argue that criminal justice processes become truly inclusive when they embrace a Māori-led approach, from research to their genuine operationalisation within the justice system. They point out that often a Western-centric theoretical and methodological approach to criminology does not allow such inclusion, distorting representations. A different commitment to research ethics in the co-production of knowledge is central to a true human rights discourse of criminology. They reflect how this is important for those with an intersectional lived experience (of incarceration, of minority identity, of intergenerational trauma).
George Radics moves the focus onto queer criminology, highlighting how colonialism in the Global South does not permit the fulfilment of a human rights-centric project. Radics traces the UN’s positioning against discriminatory laws and acts of violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity expression. Yet, despite this top-down movement, it is pointed out that the rights of LGBTQ people are formulated and entrenched in, and for, systems of the Global North, leaving behind the Global South. Using some key examples of police and courts, Radics points out how culturally embedded the issues are in the Global South, because systems of colonial oppression are maintained and reproduced via the criminal justice tools.
Sandra Walklate focuses on a victimology of human rights. In this chapter, we are invited to reflect on how victims’ narratives, and mechanisms for addressing injustice, had been left behind when the human rights discourse came to the fore, especially after the second world war and onwards. This may explain their structural absence as human rights mechanisms of justice that still reverberate into the present day. Indeed, Walklate closes the chapter with the consideration that, in her educated opinion, there is no one ‘single jurisdiction that has successfully negotiated the challenges of rendering victim rights as human rights’.
While they agree that the impact has been limited, Nancy Wonders and Sydney Shevat conclude that the international human rights system has been effective to some degree in raising worldwide awareness of gendered violence and mobilising political action. They see gendered violence as one of the most prevalent and yet least recognised human rights violations, noting that the international human rights architecture has been developed to prioritise violence experienced by men in the public sphere. Their chapter provides a comprehensive, critical review of the major human rights initiatives in this field to date, identifying punitive approaches, reliance on states and failure to address root causes of violence against women as key shortcomings, underpinned by state complicity in the perpetuation of wider gender hierarchies.
Raymond Michalowski and Rebecca Annorbah take up the challenge posed by several of the authors of bringing social and economic rights to the forefront of criminological enquiry. They contrast the concentration on individual acts of violence in criminology and domestic criminal law, with the much greater harm done by government failures to address systemic, avoidable, and often racialized, health inequalities. Presenting a mass of public health research, originating largely from the United States and with a particular focus on the policies of former President Donald Trump, they argue that disparities in health outcomes both within and between nations should be considered violations of human rights and become the subject matter for a ‘human rights criminology for public health’.
As with the previous chapter, the contribution by Claire Loughnan and Steven Caruana stretches the boundaries of mainstream criminology as they bring an engagement with the aged care sector to the discipline of criminology and human rights. Aged care facilities are a growing sector, in Australia and worldwide, with many reported episodes of violence, neglect, abuse. Often these spaces are run by poorly trained and paid staff. Sadly, these places are also becoming known for being places of confinement and control, where human rights are breached, with similar emerging patterns comparable to prisons and detention centres. Loughnan and Caruana’s chapter brings to the fore the role criminologists have to monitor and critique human rights applications, and the role of the state, when vulnerable people are harmed.
Articulating a Criminological Research Agenda for Human Rights
In relation to a future research agenda for a human rights centred criminology, our authors identified both crucial topics for further study and critical methods they consider to be best suited to this task. Some contributors also offered observations on using criminological scholarship to challenge the architecture of the international human rights regime itself. We summarise some of their key suggestions here.
Stanley proposes a relational research agenda that is capable of exposing the discursive hijacking of human rights by governments, and identifying the role of criminal justice institutions and wider structural factors in perpetuating human rights abuses. At the core of this agenda is the need to adopt empathetic approaches towards the victims of human rights violations that cut through the distancing processes that often prevent abuses from being identified as serious state harms, and to engage as allies with harmed individuals and communities.
In setting out her future agenda, Claire Hamilton alerts legal scholars and practitioners to the dangers of a narrow and overly technical focus on law. She argues that ‘doing rights criminologically’ may help ‘make rights matter’ in the security field. This entails, inter alia, the borrowing of critical criminological concepts such as ‘popular punitivism’ to bring into focus the contested and political dimension of human rights practice. She advocates using Foucauldian methodologies to examine how human rights emerge and work as governing devices under certain conditions and uncover the mentalities, knowledges and technologies deployed by various parties.
In line with Stanley’s call for criminologists to work as allies with the victims of human rights abuses, Will Jackson advocates adopting the ‘view from below’ to expose human rights abuses perpetrated by police, ideally through ethnographic work with heavily policed populations. The objective of human rights centred police research should be to identify the impact of policing on these populations and interrogate the official account of human rights compliance with a view to increasing police accountability, not merely bolstering their operational efficiency. Key here is the need for researchers to retain total independence from police organisations in order to avoid capture in the organisational perspective of this powerful arm of the state.
In a world marked by enormous global inequalities, Franko argues that we need a better conceptual, methodological and theoretical apparatus to understand the unequal protection of human life at the global level. This includes adopting different conceptions of state sovereignty, by privileging perspectives from the Global South. Adopting these perspectives may reveal that human rights do not stand up to scrutiny as protectors of life where there is no one to enforce them, and that new thinking may be needed through the building of ‘more democratic knowledge structures’.
Fili and Bosworth suggest that research into human rights abuses in immigration detention needs to refocus on how institutions charged with monitoring human rights observance perform their duties. Greater awareness is needed of how monitoring systems can become compromised, deflect attention from larger questions about the use of detention and provide ‘normative cover’ for harmful practices. It is vital, in their view, to document human rights abuses and other state failures. And while translating evidence into the dismantling or reform of abusive systems ‘is not an easy task’, there is benefit in joining in solidarity with colleagues dealing with similarly ‘bleak landscapes’.
For Tapia Tapia, the human rights system itself is the rightful object of criminological research, necessitating the adoption of anticolonial, abolitionist and feminist perspectives to ensure that human rights do not ‘perpetuate a hegemonic order’. With respect to violence against women, this agenda includes mapping the relationship between ‘human rights penality’ and the decline of non-penal (including socio-economic) approaches to gender justice; engaging with the activism of abolitionist feminists and counter-carceral movements; and assessing the damaging effects of punitive approaches advocated by the international human rights regime in tackling violence against women.
Ciocchini and Greener acknowledge the potential human rights can offer if they are interpreted more inclusively, through a southern criminology lens. They claim that the principle of self-determination can bring real societal changes. Human rights should be able to reshape global economy and give a more equal access to wealth and resources. A human rights-centric project should address corporate crime. Only through such a structural-cultural shift, can experiences of crime and violence change too.
To render human rights principles effective, and appreciate all justice mechanisms that are operational within local contexts, Watson, Berg and Laponi argue that ‘access to justice’ would benefit from a process of decolonisation. As it stands, informal and hybrid systems may be inaccurately dismissed as ineffective in advancing access to justice, because they are mapped out against a Western theorising. Such local and informal systems could in fact actualise access to justice more in line with human rights principles, and therefore engaging with these players and systems may be the step necessary towards an inclusive and fairer approach.
Black, Burnside, Hastings and Thom point out the violent outcome for Indigenous people in the current Western-centric legal system. Indigenous rights have not been properly protected in the current regime. They argue that a human rights criminological lens can accelerate the re-envisioning of an inclusive system and can promote the voices of lived experience. They see the co-production of knowledge at the centre of such a vision, for a significant and much needed human rights shift away from the current approach. This may require ‘resisting westernised ideas’ on methodological approaches, to minimise and avoid further marginalisation.
Radics argues that queer criminology has a role in highlighting the systemic and cultural differences between Global North and Global South to make progress. This should include questioning how to progress inclusive human rights instruments and mechanisms, if colonialism is still acutely operative. Radics points out that a more nuanced understanding of the societal issues triggering negative responses towards LGBTQ rights should be a high priority in the human rights agenda of key stakeholders, such as the United Nations.
Walklate urges for a global political commitment to systemic change, where human rights can find the conditions to be central and meaningful to and for victims. Walklate adopts a framework of good practice to engage with victim story-telling and suggests expanding it through the lens of human rights. This may be more reflective of time, place and voice and therefore act on inclusivity at a societal and individual level.
Wonders and Shevat argue that future research should draw on the rich body of existing criminological research to enable the international human rights architecture to target the structural drivers of gendered violence. These include the role of states in maintaining gender inequalities, the gendered impacts of conflicts and climate change, gendered barriers to mobility and the rise of nationalist and right-wing politics. They argue that empirical research makes otherwise invisible power dynamics visible and can be used to empower populations in ways that challenge the dominant order, including the masculinist, neoliberal and colonial frames that have shaped the international human rights order itself.
Michalowski and Annorbah urge criminologists, especially those already versed in the study of state and corporate crime, to direct their scholarship and activism towards the proximate and distal drivers of ‘public health crimes’, carving out some new terrain for a human rights criminology for public health. They contend that critical criminologists are well placed to ‘pull the lens back’ from the immediate infliction of harm to identify the ‘upstream drivers’ or wider context of these systemic harms. They present an expansive analytical framework for this purpose that integrates the individual, organisational and macro-social levels of social action.
In the ‘quasi-carceral’ space of aged care facilities, Loughnan and Caruana use the lens of international agreements aimed at preventing torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. They are concerned that, without a real application of international human rights frameworks, there is little possibility to detect and address harmful practices. A human rights centred criminology would focus on the harm and on tools to prevent it. Their work is inspirational, because they continue the expansive analytical framework of the chapters before and point out how a human rights lens permits pushing the boundaries of criminology further.
Conclusion
A human rights-centred criminology brings benefits both to the study of human rights practice and to criminology as a discipline. On the one hand, the place-based, empirical approach of criminology complements the juridical perspective of human rights lawyers. At the same time, the injection of human rights thinking into criminology provides a recognised normative framework to complement the analytical frameworks already adopted by criminologists to uncover entrenched, structural harms. Moreover, the focus in critical criminology, on critique of the state and of patriarchy, colonialism and other hegemonic systems of thought, provides the tools to unmask the manipulation of existing human rights systems by governments and the conceptual inadequacies arising from the imposition of dominant modes of Western liberal thought at a global level.
The critical, human rights centred criminology our contributors imagine works for human rights, but not necessarily through them. It is not intended to be a discreet sub-discipline, but a way to do both criminology and human rights better by bringing together a range of intellectual tools to analyse and respond to a continuum of harms that extends beyond both state-defined crimes (the focus of mainstream criminology) and individual violations of civil liberties (the primary substance of legal scholarship in human rights). Our collection here covers many of the core and emerging areas of critical criminological concern but is far from comprehensive. We hope to deal in more depth with many of the issues identified here, and many others not addressed in these pages, in further publications in the Critical Studies in Human Rights and Criminology series.
Note
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1.
But see Weber et al. (2017) for a selection of critical writing on criminology and human rights.
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Weber, L., Marmo, M. (2024). Towards a Human Rights Centred Criminology. In: Weber, L., Marmo, M. (eds) A Research Agenda for a Human Rights Centred Criminology. Palgrave Critical Studies in Human Rights and Criminology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46289-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46289-4_1
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