Our Social Work publishing features books and journals that help to address issues arising from poverty, inequality and social injustice.
The list includes monographs, textbooks and practitioner guides, series, including Research in Social Work co-published with the European Social Work Research Association, and the Critical and Radical Social Work and European Social Work Research journals.
Policy Press is the leading UK book publisher for books on child abuse, child sexual exploitation, child protection and children’s social work.
Social Work
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Sedition laws were crucial for imperial control in the mid-19th and 20th centuries, criminalizing political dissent and nationalism in British colonies. A century-and-a-half later, the laws continue to be applied to discipline and deter government critics. In Pakistan, the application of the law of sedition has intensified in reaction to civil society protests and social movements challenging state violence and injustices against marginalized communities. Although sedition has been approached in critical historical, legal and political scholarship on South Asia, we unpack how the threat and application of this law continues to shape the lived experiences of civilians impacted and rendered insecure as the postcolonial state seeks to pacify resistance to its authority and discipline dissidents. We develop existing understandings of how criminalization serves as a weapon for postcolonial states, where regimes have remained inherently insecure and regime insecurity becomes a lens through which such criminalization of activism and dissent may be understood.
Brazil has a unique model for organizing police work between two separate and independent agencies. The investigation of crimes is carried out by the civilian police, while preventive and patrol policing are carried out by military police. This structure and organization, legacies of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), have not changed with the advent of democracy (1988). This chapter discusses this model of policing and its implications for Brazilian democracy. Using the concept of procedural justice developed by Tom Tyler (2003) to gauge democratic policing, we analyse the perceptions of police officers on democratic ways of exercising police authority. An important finding is that military police officers are less supportive of procedural justice policing than civilian police officers. This helps account for the persistence of undemocratic police forces in democratic countries in the global South and the impact of the militarization of police forces on political regimes that claim to be democratic.
This chapter considers the violent legacies of empire, for imperialism (in its colonial and postcolonial forms) has been central to the political construction of ‘Southern-ness’. Military domination of Southern lands is frequently associated with a brutal violence exercised against Indigenous peoples, while in more recent times the task of domestic pacification has increasingly fallen to police agencies and their paramilitary partners. In this chapter a line is drawn between the history of imperial massacres, the police killings at Marikana mine, South Africa, and the war crimes and human rights abuses perpetrated by coalition troops during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as the coalition forces pursued goals of regime change, peace-building and the reconstruction of domestic political order. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, the goals of neoliberal internationalism have been found seriously wanting as practised by military liberal interventionism, raising once again the myth and paradox of ‘liberal empire’.
This chapter outlines the trajectory of Robson, a ‘community leader’ and wannabe ‘politician’ from Niterói, a municipality located in the Metropolitan Area of Rio de Janeiro. The chapter describes Robson’s efforts to become a legitimate representative of Palácio, enabled to ‘speak on behalf of the community’, intermediating with public and private agencies to improve the lives of their inhabitants. Robson’s efforts to become a favela politician, moving from being a community leader, illustrate the complex social processes implicated in the construction of Palácio as a ‘place’ (Bourdieu, 1997). In developing this analysis we explore relationships between violence, mobility and inequality, offering insights into the concept of ‘global South’ as a moving border, where the ambivalent coexistence between connection and separation produces zones of intense exchange and conflict promoting the ‘subaltern integration’ of Palácio in the cultural, political and economic life of the city of Niterói.
This chapter develops a critical approach to the making of security and insecurity, employing insights from postcolonial and decolonial literature. Critical approaches have played a key role in expanding the frontiers of the concept of security through a critique of both methodological nationalism and nationalist methodology. However, by not detaching themselves from liberal reasoning such approaches end up endorsing a normative cosmopolitan individualism. In contrast, we explore the potential of the categories ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ to deepen a critical perspective in security studies. We suggest empires should not be analytically understood only by their formal political institutions, but also by the articulation they have historically produced between the colonial difference they establish and the accumulation by dispossession they enable. Colonial forms of expropriation have long constituted generative mechanisms of human insecurity, whose features are more distinguishable from a perspective of the global South.
Policing and music are rarely thought together in mainstream criminological literature, yet this chapter, by tracing the origins of British policing to its colonial roots, demonstrates how colonial militias were formed to police the music of the enslaved as a sign of rebellion, insurrection and disorder. Drawing on Afro-diasporic music – as an indicative case study – policing and racism will be contextualized as concurrent, constitutive and dependent on each other; exposing the historical mission and function of policing as a force of racial violence. By rethinking police racism through Afro-diasporic music(s), this chapter encourages a (Southern) decolonial approach to police scholarship – to reintroduce the police as guardians of a social and political order that is marked by racial hierarchies, whose roots lie in the imperial ideology that created racism, ‘race’ and policing.
The chapter introduces the volume, sketches the broad outlines of the 16 substantive chapters which follow and sets out the issues and concerns which underpin the approach taken by the collection. The discussion engages, albeit briefly, with the work of a range of Southern and postcolonial commentators who have drawn attention to Southern differences and the postcolonial intersectionalities of race, gender and class. The chapter also introduces the notion of ‘boomerang’ (or ‘blowback’) effects as violence and forms of criminalization and securitization, which were first deployed by imperial nations across their empires, find their way back home and into in the modern governance systems of Northern neoliberal societies. At the same time, processes of transnational governance, even disarmament, peace and human rights initiatives, replicate the many of imperial relations they were meant to ameliorate or replace.
In mid-2020, protest movements against police violence erupted around the world. Many of these were in solidarity with those protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and took on references to the Black Lives Matter movement. The global demonstrations were sparked by the events in the United States, but they were also part of ongoing international protest movements. In Australia, First Nations-led protests against Aboriginal deaths in police and prison custody have been a feature of the political landscape for decades (Whittaker, 2020). In Latin America the extent of police violence meant that protests against police were common occurrences (Watson, 2020). This chapter considers the shared themes that have united these global outpourings of protest against the violence of police and security forces and places them within the broader historical and contemporary framework of (de)colonialism.
Across 18 specially commissioned chapters this book draws together several emerging academic, theoretical and research-inspired concerns relating to ‘Southern perspectives’ in criminology and existing scholarship on colonialism and the decolonization of the criminological imagination. There are chapters on Southern and imperial legacies regarding policing, criminal justice and the law, penal systems and the abuse of human rights. These issues are discussed in relation to both new and old issues regarding racism, the ‘weaponization’ of the South, the neoliberal world order, criminalization processes and state violence, the suppression of political protest and exploitative economic relations contributing to environmental degradation and human insecurity. The chapters are written by both experienced and early career scholars working around the world including South and Central America and the Caribbean, Asia and Australasia. Case studies and materials covered include, police violence in South Africa, the privatization of military and security forces, war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the criminalization of environmental protest in South America, the policing of Black music and culture, riots and authority in Brazilian prisons, the negotiation of order and safety in poor communities and the emergence of a postcolonial feminist agenda for human rights.
The re-emergence of the political economy of punishment in criminological accounts has prompted a growth in comparative analyses among different countries. This work, however, have been basically limited to the core countries of capitalism, yet Southern countries have often been overlooked by this work. This chapter brings a Southern and peripheral reality to the contemporary criminological debate on the political economy of punishment. It also shows how the uncritical importation of criminological theories fails to understand the reality and demands of peripheral societies and their contexts. By contrast, appropriate contextualization of accumulated criminological knowledge can be helpful to make sense of distinct phenomena experienced in peripheral regions. This is shown by the relation between punishment, imprisonment and discipline in Brazilian prisons. Accordingly, this chapter explores historical and contemporary powers, forces and events that have deeply influenced patterns and trends of punishment in Southern penal systems.
