This book explores how the law and the institutions of the criminal justice system expose minorities to different types of violence, either directly, through discrimination and harassment, or indirectly, by creating the conditions that make them vulnerable to violence from other groups of society. It draws on empirical insights across a broad array of communities and locales including Afghanistan, Colombia, Pakistan, India, Malawi, Turkey, Brazil, Singapore, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It examines the challenges of protecting those at the margins of power, especially those whom the law is often used to oppress. The chapters explore intersecting, marginal identities influenced by four factors: rebuilding after violent regimes, economic interest behind the violence, entrenched cultural biases, and criminalisation of diversity. It provides scholars from the Global North with important lessons when attempting to impose their own solutions onto nations with a different history and context, or when applying their own laws to migrants from the Global South nations explored in this book. It speaks to legal and social science scholars in the fields of law, sociology, criminology, and social work.

This edited volume presents the work of academics from the Global South and explores, from local and regional settings, how the legal order and people’s perceptions of it translates into an understanding of what constitutes "criminal" behaviors or activities. This book aims to address the gap between criminal law in theory and practice in the Global South by assembling 11 chapters from established and emerging scholars from various underrepresented regions of the world. Drawing on research from Singapore, the Philippines, Peru, Indonesia, India, the Dominican Republic, Burma, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Argentina, this book explores a range of issues that straddle the line between social deviance and legal crimes in such societies, including extramarital affairs, gender-based violence, gambling, LGBT issues, and corruption. Issues of inclusivity versus exclusivity, modernity versus tradition, globalization of capital versus cultural revivalism are explored. The contributions critically analyze the role politics and institutions play in shaping these issues. There is an urgent need for empirical studies and new theoretical approaches that can capture the complexity of crime phenomena that occur in the Global South. This book will provide essential material to facilitate the development of new approaches more suitable to understanding the social phenomena related to crime in these societies. This book will make an important contribution in the development of Southern criminology. It will be of interest to students and researchers of criminology and sociology engaged in studies of sentencing and punishment, theories of crime, law and practice, and postcolonialism.

This book explores whether the legal and political institutions of Afghanistan were able to incorporate diverse ethnic groups into the political process. Ethnic accommodation has gained central stage in the literature on institutional design and democratic consolidation. However, some divided societies are more explored than others, and Afghanistan is one understudied country that is critically important for testing and improving our theories of institutional design in a democratizing, plural society. This work examines the Constitution of 2004 and those provisions of electoral laws and political party laws that together devised Afghan political institutions including those of the presidential system, unitary government, electoral systems as well as the party system. It argues that due to their incongruence in design and effects, the Afghan political institutions failed to fully accommodate ethnic groups in the political process. This book adopts a holistic approach, while also paying careful attention to the details of each of the individual pieces of political institutions designed by the Constitution of 2004. Taken together, this approach yields insights into the boundaries and interactions of institutional design and how their interactions hinder or advance ethnic accommodation in varying contexts. The book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and policy makers interested in constitutional law and politics.

This insightful book examines the allegations against the professionalism, transparency, and integrity of law enforcement toward minority groups, from a global perspective. It addresses the challenges inherent in maintaining strong ties with members of the community, and draws attention to obstacles in ensuring public confidence and trust in rule of law institutions. Most importantly, the book provides insight into mechanisms and proposals for policy reform that would permit enhanced police-community partnership, collaboration and mutual respect. Acknowledging the consistency of this concern despite geographic location, ethnic diversity, and religious tolerance, this book considers controversial factors that have caused many groups and individuals to question their relationship with law enforcement. The book examines the context of police-community relations with contributed research from Nigeria, South Africa, Kosovo, Turkey, New Zealand, Mexico, Scandinavia and other North American and European viewpoints. It evaluates the roles that critical factors such as ethnicity, political instability, conflict, colonization, mental health, police practice, religion, critical criminology, socialism, and many other important aspects and concepts have played on perceptions of policing and rule of law. A valuable resource for law enforcement practitioners and researchers, policy makers, and students of criminal justice, Policing and Minority Communities: Contemporary Issues and Global Perspectives confronts crucial challenges and controversies in policing today with quantitative and qualitative research and practical policy recommendations.

In The Criminalization of Democratic Politics in the Global South, Zaffaroni, Caamaño and Vegh Weis offer an account of the misuse of the law to criminalize progressive political leaders in Latin America.

This book enquires into the counter-hegemonic capacity of international criminal justice. It highlights perspectives and themes that have thus far often been neglected in the scholarship on (critical approaches to) international criminal justice. Can international criminal justice be viewed as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ project? And if so, under what conditions? In response to these questions, scholars and practitioners from the Global South and North reflect inter alia on the engagement with international criminal justice in the context of Ukraine, Palestine, and minorities in South-Asia while also highlighting the hegemonic tendencies built into the institutional structure of the International Criminal Court on the axes of gender and language. Florian Jeßberger is Professor of Criminal Law and Director of the Franz von Liszt Institute for International Criminal Justice, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Leonie Steinl is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Kalika Mehta is an Associate Researcher at the Franz von Liszt Institute for International Criminal Justice, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany.

This book brings together jurisprudential debates on international criminal law, international law scholarship on the limits of state sovereignty, and applied political philosophy concerning responsibility and accountability in the context of mass political crimes and state criminality. It offers a compelling view of legal reasoning concerning accountability regimes in the Global South. No other study addresses questions of ethical dimensions of mass crimes and accountability for state criminality.

Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South seeks to identify the drivers of urban violence in the cities of the Global South and how they relate to and interact with poverty and inequalities. Drawing on the findings of an ambitious 5-year, 15-project research programme supported by Canada’s International Development Research Centre and the UK’s Department for International Development, the book explores what works, and what doesn't, to prevent and reduce violence in urban centres. Cities in developing countries are often seen as key drivers of economic growth, but they are often also the sites of extreme violence, poverty, and inequality. The research in this book was developed and conducted by researchers from the Global South, who work and live in the countries studied; it challenges many of the assumptions from the Global North about how poverty, violence, and inequalities interact in urban spaces. In so doing, the book demonstrates that accepted understandings of the causes of and solutions to urban violence developed in the Global North should not be imported into the Global South without careful consideration of local dynamics and contexts. Reducing Urban Violence in the Global South concludes by considering the broader implications for policy and practice, offering recommendations for improving interventions to make cities safer and more inclusive. The fresh perspectives and insights offered by this book will be useful to scholars and students of development and urban violence, as well as to practitioners and policymakers working on urban violence reduction programmes.

This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.

This innovative study presents a genealogy of modern comparative law, examining both theory and practice around the world.