Abstract
While green criminology has grown in its scope and orientation, the field is still limited, being primarily practiced by Northern, and with publications written almost exclusively in English. In this chapter, I argue that because of its ability to study instances of environmental degradation, green criminology could be used as decolonial tool by identifying, exposing and confronting cases of colonial environmental discrimination, marginalization and exploitation. Using the example of Colombia, I argue that one way green criminology could aid the decolonial project of Southern criminology is by being a ‘stereoscopic tool’. This approach, while allowing for the recognition of colonial dynamics, also facilitates combining Western and Southern knowledge, ideally resulting in deeper analyses of both environmentally harmful practices and the potential and actual responses to them.
Notes
- 1.
For simplicity reasons, I refer here to Indigenous Columbian, peasant and Afro-descendant communities as natives. These categories are not related to ‘races’ but are self-adopted cultural identities. It is not my interest here to define each of these categories, but for an explanation of peasant, see Navarrete Cruz (2011); of Afro-descendant, see Pulido Londoño (2011); and of Indigenous, see Bossi (2011).
- 2.
I use Western science, Western academia or simply academia interchangeably. This is defined below.
- 3.
‘That professional researcher who comes here is nothing else than another Colón’.
- 4.
‘Academia is too hierarchical and does not have the purpose of helping the community. It has the goal of creating egos, of adding diplomas on the wall, and of earning more money’.
- 5.
‘I think that academia is even bad because it transforms into paper what used to be empirical’.
- 6.
‘The flesh, the blood, the skeleton and the sweat do not live from the academia. Academia is too rigid, and that in real life does not work’.
- 7.
‘Academia has a problem. It is that it devalues the knowledge of others, the learning process of others […] what scholars do is to charge for hiding information and then selling it’.
- 8.
‘They are writing books while we are actually doing something’.
- 9.
‘In the university you are given a model and you have to reproduce it, there is no other way’.
- 10.
‘In environmental issues academia has brought more harm than benefits with its interventions’.
- 11.
‘Why does science allow the use of pesticides that are destroying the world? Of what kind of science are we talking about? Are we talking about the science of destruction? We should look for a science of persistence’.
- 12.
Only the naming and institutionalization of green criminology can be clearly localized in the ‘West’. As Nigel South and I (in press) have shown somewhere else, precedents of green criminology can be found all over the world before its institutionalization.
- 13.
- 14.
This definition echoes that of Aniyar de Castro (1987) of ‘Latin American Criminology’ as the criminology created considering Latin American particularities and useful for its liberation, as opposed to the criminology imposed on Latin America.
- 15.
The interest here is on the epistemological consequences of colonialism. Consequently, I focus on the oppressed human communities. Nonetheless, colonialism did not limit itself to inter-human relations, but also implemented the project of human domination over the natural world (Berry 1999; Mol 2013).
- 16.
That is, Western science does not refer to a geographical location nor to specific knowledge creating techniques. Logical reasoning methods (e.g., induction, deduction, analogy, etc.) and empirical exploration and experimentation methods (e.g., verification, falsification, etc.) are not exclusive of Western science, so they cannot be treated as its distinctive trait (Krugly-Smolska 1994).
- 17.
Familiar Western validation processes are peer reviews and evaluation committees. Validation techniques are, for example, proof by contradiction (Wierzbicki 2016) and the preference of axiomatization over general descriptions. Meanwhile a validity requisite in the Persian civilization, as described by Alavi (in Holzner et al. 1985), is usefulness according to the standards contained in the Qur’an.
- 18.
- 19.
I use here the concept ‘endogenous’, that is, arising from within (Park and Allaby 2013), to make explicit the existence of a diversity of representations and knowledges about the world that whereas exist in a continuum, differ from each other in important regards. However, I am aware of what has been coined as the ‘essentialization trap’ (Demeulenaere 2014), as discussed below.
- 20.
- 21.
A phenomenon allegedly also product of the Gaia principle (Sheptycki 2016).
- 22.
Technically defined as ‘a variation of the relative distance between two object points located at different distances from the centre of acquisition, as consequence of the shifting of this one’ (Gomarasca 2009: 92).
- 23.
I provide a brief overview of how it will be used.
- 24.
This also happens in the physical phenomenon that inspires my analogy (2009: 91).
- 25.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Mari Kvam, Hernando Rodríguez Palacino, Sveinung Sandverg, Ragnhild Sollund, John Todd, Tanya Wyatt and in general my colleagues in the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo.
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Goyes, D.R. (2018). Green Criminology as Decolonial Tool: A Stereoscope of Environmental Harm. In: Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., Sozzo, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_17
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