A Friendly Critique of Asian Criminology and Southern Criminology

Running head: Studying Social Sciences: A Critical Approach
Studying Social Sciences: A Critical Approach
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1STUDYING SOCIAL SCIENCES: A CRITICAL APPROACH
A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’
Criminology is marked by an ethnocentrism and is frequently excluded from non-western
scholarship. This article analyzes Asian Criminology and Southern Criminology because there
have been a lack of theoretical interrogation in these fields. The main aim of the article is to
show how Asian Criminology and Southern Criminology are trying to decolonize criminology
from a Western centric bias and incorporating marginalized perspectives.
This research is topical because Asian criminology is very important and it is a major
loss for practitioners, criminologists etc to miss this engaging and enlightening field of study. In
addition, conducting a research in this field is important as Western criminology can learn a lot
from Asian criminology. Southern criminology is important because it provides a fresh insight to
crime, punishment and crime control. Thus, research in these fields is necessary to decolonize
criminology.
The study explores Asian and Southern criminology and tries to negate the belief in the
field of social sciences that academic scholarship outside the West is inferior, irrelevant and is of
a low quality. The study strives to pursue the decoloniality of knowledge. This paper further
illustrates the similarities between Asian criminology and Southern criminology. Both
approaches of criminology criticize this tendency to exclude criminal knowledge from the
periphery and propagate the fact that this outlook should undergo a change. Both these
approaches seek to give priority to research agendas that are integral for marginal societies. They
also take into account the significance of religion in relation to crime. They also give priority to
the postcolonial context of most Southern and Asian societies because the fallout from the
colonial era is a key subject that academicians from these approaches of criminology are

2STUDYING SOCIAL SCIENCES: A CRITICAL APPROACH
concerned. Southern criminology and Asian criminology are also similar in the sense that both
paradigms do not include much of Global South as is required. Asian criminology and Southern
criminology too have similar differences. Both paradigms face an inadequate examination of
their ontological, epistemological and philosophical premises. The lack of sustained critique of
these two paradigms has led to the fact that both Asian and Southern criminology lacks a
concrete definition (Liu 2018).
The study further explores the differences between Asian criminologists and
Southern criminologists, which include the fact that Asian criminology is administrative,
quantitative, positivist in nature in contrast to Southern criminology and tends to combat crime
from the perspective of a state. Asian criminology has also created a large number of empirical
studies than Southern criminology, which is more intangible than Asian criminology. Asian
criminology also coalesces with other fields of criminology, which include green criminology,
feminist criminology and queer criminology. Unlike Southern criminology, Asian criminology
does not provide much research related to gender. This is because in Asia, criminology persists
in being a masculine discipline where Asian women are not represented properly. This is most
regrettable since the efforts to decolonize criminology will remain incomplete if women scholars
are not taken into account (Liu 2018).
The reason why some criminologists from the periphery are ignored is because some
criminologists lack a fluency in the English language. Since English is the main medium of
language, criminologists who are proficient in English have an upper hand over those
criminologists who are not that proficient in English and are therefore unable to express
themselves (Carrington, Hogg & Sozzo, 2018). To change this scenario, some
recommendations include Asian and Southern criminologists who are proficient in English