 Firstly, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you so much for coming to this conference. I know I speak on behalf of everybody here. I've really learned a lot and I'm just really, really grateful for everybody giving up their time and their wisdom and for sharing their experiences and all their knowledge with us. You know, you've also created a really positive atmosphere and really, really discussions and I think that's really appreciated by everybody. I also just want to thank the staff at SAAS, particularly the IT, catering, cleaning staff, administered staff. You know, none of this happens by itself. It depends on a lot of labour. So yeah, just thank you to everybody who's been a part of this. And then Kate Grady isn't here, but thank you to Kate Grady and to Scott Newton as well for their invaluable support and to also to Caroline who's been just unbelievable and amazing throughout this conference. So yeah, thanks to everybody. I'm now, now I'm really excited to chair this roundtable discussion. What does it mean to decolonise criminal justice? So throughout this conference, we've seen just how difficult it is to disentangle systems of carcerality and criminal justice from colonial histories, legacies and continuities. And, you know, perhaps most explicitly, we started this with our first panel, prisons as colonial relics across Africa, to see how many prisons that are still in use today were literally built by colonial authorities. And throughout this conference, we've seen how this extends far beyond, of course, the African continent and indeed way beyond prisons, also to policing and judiceries and beyond physical infrastructure, obviously. And, you know, colonialities don't just appear in prison walls or on the police uniform, but also in the hierarchies of race, class and gender that these systems uphold. And so this begs the question, if we are committed to decolonisation, which I hope we are, then what does this mean for the future for our systems of criminal justice? And it makes some trivial, but I think it's important to ask this question, what does it mean rather than how can we decolonise systems of criminal justice? Because I think the former really opens up a possibility that the latter doesn't, which is that we're not able to decolonise systems of criminal justice. And it's precisely understanding what it means to decolonise systems of criminal justice that might lead us to conclude whether this actually is a worthwhile endeavour or not. Because there is this kind of fundamental tension between transforming our systems based on decolonisation, or maybe dismantling all together, and what does decolonisation actually require. So I'm really delighted to be joined by four amazing speakers. The first is Anna Aliverti, who is a professor of law at the School of Law University of Warwick. Her research explores questions of national identity and belonging in criminal justice and of law, sovereignty and globalisation. She has led extensive empirical work in the UK's criminal justice and immigration systems. She's the author of Crimes of Mobility, Policing the Borders Within, and she is also co-director of the Criminal Justice Centre at Warwick, and the associate director of Border Criminologies. She's also co-editor of the book Decolonising the Criminal Question, Rethinking the Colonial Legacies, Epistemologies and Geographies of Criminal Justice. Our second speaker is Dr Eddie Bruce Jones, who is the executive dean of the School of Law at Birkbeck. He's a member of the New York Bar, an associate academic fellow of the Inner Temple. He's author of Race in the Shadow of Law, State Violence in Contemporary Europe, and he serves on the Board of Directors of the Institute of Race Relations and Rainbow Migration, as well as the advisory board of the Centre for Intersectional Justice. He has advised various intergovernmental and civil society organisations on issues of racism and human rights, including the Office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights and the Equality Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. He's an editor of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law and advisor to the European Law Open. Dr Lisa Long is a senior lecturer in criminology. She joined Leedsbeck University in 2015 and has taught on a range of criminology modules. Her research interests include race and racism's inequalities in the criminal justice system and critical race theory slash criminology. Lisa was awarded her doctorate in 2016 by the University of Leeds and her monograph, Perpetual Suspects, Critical Race Theory of Black and Mixed Race Experiences of Policing is recently published with Power Grave McMillan. And finally we have Vanessa E. Thompson joining us online who is an assistant professor in Black Studies at the Department of Gender Studies, Queen's University. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on Black Studies and anti-colonialism, state violence and abolition, critical racism, migration and border studies, multiracial solidarities, internationalism from below and activist ethnographies. She's published on blackness and black movements in France and Europe more broadly and black abolitionist struggles and world making. Vanessa is a member of the International Independent Commission on the Death of Uri Jallow and organizes with abolitionist feminist collectors in Europe and globally. That's a very big wrap chief for all of these speakers so thank you so much for being with us and I thought I just ask each of you to offer some kind of opening brief remarks on what you broadly think of this question of decolonizing criminal justice. Anna did you want to? Yeah, sure. Hello everyone. It's a bit difficult to follow up from the film I still have my emotional state but I'll try. So thinking about the question that Oli posed and thank you very much Oli for the invitation and for organizing this amazing conference. So thinking around the question that Oli posed around what do I understood to mean this idea of the relationship between decolonization and criminal justice and for me decolonization is a deconstruction exercise that builds on a range of traditions and I mean in this way I'm a bit unease about kind of thinking about different kind of a strands of criminology or or or criminological theories around you know soldering or decolonizing or abolitionist theory. I think feminist theory, critical race theory, I think decolonization builds a lot around the concepts, the ideas, the rethinking about epistemology epistemologies that are taking forward and are kind of free rethought in the in you know postcolonial theories and cultural studies etc. So it is a deconstruction work that is both intellectual, it's political and it's ethical and it engages with with rethinks the the practices, the concepts, the spaces, the epistemologies that we that shape the way we understand our our field of research and in particular it foregrounds historical very complex and very diverse historical processes that we might call colonialism and imperialism because as we saw throughout the the the conference the way in which we dealt with and we conceptualize colonialism and the context that we study are very different and and with it you know there's there's an there's the importance of acknowledging that diversity of context is very is very different you know that in terms of historical terms although when we refer to colonization at least in the context of the British context we think about the the British the French 1918 century the process of you know the colonization for instance of Latin America is very very different and and it has different and legacies and implications and in the same way you know the way in which we study settler white settler societies is very different from the processes that happen in in countries where the white population was not it's not a majority so so again it it is a very complex and and diverse field and it's also demonstrate that this idea of the post right that is very much criticized in a way the postcolonial the idea of decolonizing very much race the issue of to what extent there is a historical line they are dividing history from contemporary processes and and and the question of legacies now we can we can then talk about legacies and how conceptualize legacies and and and study them empirically in terms of thinking about contemporary process and and in terms of you know this broader field of work of literature of scholarship the the question of the criminal justice question is so important because criminal justice processes and institutions have been at the center of the modern capitalist colonial system and it's kind of very much legitimize the culture and the material processes that that drove those those processes and and and you know this is a a criminology as the study of those systems and the the idea of crime is you know is the the science of the other right is so obviously you know it's quite significance for the for the project of decolonization and so my thinking around that about this idea of decolonizing the criminal justice and pointing to all these uh no um arguments before is to what extent we can decolonize a system and apparatus uh that has been so central for um colonization and exploitation racial exploitation where you know race in a sense has been um kind of inventing or scientifically legitimize for by many of the practice scientific uh scientific practices and uh so i'm i'm thinking when the this dilemma is is raised about uh an idea in abolitionist theory about this this idea of the horizon right the abolitionist horizon and and we can't you know it kind of expect that all this um system of oppression that that builds on structural inequality inequalities are going to go away uh tomorrow but that the idea of horizon and perhaps decolonizing horizon perhaps give us a roadmap to think about how to advance those a project and we've been discussing those in in different sessions within the con the the con the conference i think at the intellectual level um there's quite a lot of scope for rethinking and questioning uh state sanction uh categories the where the why the who the what of criminal justice the concepts and categories and practices that serve as the scaffold of the system and shapes its core and its limits um how and and and for us as the you know um people who who try to make sense of all these um practices um you know in many ways there has been quite a lot of work in uh questioning precisely the the idea of the the limits of uh the criminal justice in terms of the nation state and we so we see that for instance in terms of migration research um the state the the extent to which you know the nation state is a challenge as a as a as a um um framework as a spatial framework and and and ask us to rethink uh uh criminal justice practices in terms of interconnections global interconnections the circulation of uh idea the literature around troubles of of the criminal justice penal transplants global uh transplant and this is of course an area that is it's very much uh close to me because i've done uh quite a lot of of research around this idea of immigration and and and uh you know if we think again there has been quite a few papers in this conference about this um um this um this topic and to what extent you know the the of the penal carceral apparatus around border controls and migration controls um very much is part of that uh system it's not outside and it's kind of resembling and and morphing um so another point that i i i want you to make and with that i i i allow my colleagues to to to talk it's about the the work that the contributions that um many the colonial uh scholars and southern scholars um have made in relation to the the more ethical um dilemmas or or perhaps the the the positionality of us in terms of how we see uh the the and how do we do we research the the criminal justice and how it has been research in terms of an um you know the dominance of aglio anglo-american uh scholarships scholarship in in english as a lingua franca um and how those narratives and those pieces of research also frame the way in which um we see the criminal justice in so uh we need to be as well very aware of these um um biases and also um you know try to think about the the narrow way in which conceptions about uh this range of practices and systems have been theorized thank you thank you ana thank you very much um hi everyone thank you for inviting me to this and it's been really great to connect with people across different disciplines and hello to my colleague vanessa and uh there's that at the screen um so i am not a criminologist and i think that i'm a bit disconnected from within the discipline of criminology what's you know what these debates are are are like so i'm looking forward to reading your book ana but i was um i was pleased to hear that i'm i'm thinking in a similar direction in terms of uh you're what you were referring to as the abolitionist horizon and maybe the the horizon of um of decolonizing decolonizing as a project um because when i hear the term decolonize and then you just plug in whatever you want afterwards decolonize education decolonize anything you can think of has decolonized as an adjective these days and i guess the trap is um a really you know ready made packaged version of whatever critical theory you want is now you know the fad is to call it decolonizing but there's a real set of urgent political commitments that is also within that and i think i really like the way that you point to the the lineage of different different forms of critical thinking within academia but also that have emerged from social movements so critical race theory um critical feminist thought critical race feminism um uh post-colonial theories and and also from movements that don't have um you know the the air time or the uh or aren't easily accessible within western academia that are likely ones that could really give us a good frameworks for thinking about what that horizon could potentially look like so one thing that in terms of approaching that the concept of decolonizing criminology or decolonizing carceral policy one thing to think about is what we even mean by decolonize so of course that's opening up the can of worms that we're going to have to open with that with with the idea of you know where the limits are to criminal um justice and all of those things need to be defined so that we can grapple with them but some things that i think come to mind with coloniality are um the idea of the state and the state form as one of the central ways in which that's negotiated maybe not the only one but definitely um you know the state as a way a mechanism for controlling populations and as a vehicle for colonizing and having that coloniality be enduring so in one of the panels um we're looking at uh different ways in which coloniality and colonial borders and on the african continent for example have then shaped the way in which uh both um uh certain types of governmental regimes operate but then also reinforce certain ideas about how people um you know what people uh locally are thinking or the relationship of different people to one another layered on top of um and this came up in a side conversation outside of the panel um a way in which uh the assumption that there are groupings that are more naturalized than the groupings that are colonial and that that one or the other is authentic and there's there's just this discourse that comes comes out of um the legacies of colonialism that are not helpful in understanding what's happening on the ground with people who are actually producing their own ways of thinking about themselves and about uh the possibility of this horizon so i think one thing is to think about how we can how we can frame coloniality as a particular type of um frame that we need to intervene on and how that difference differs and how it's similar to some of the other frames that we might be thinking about such as race or such as you know bordering per se um because i think that can give us a clue as to whether the questions that we're asking are the ones that are gonna meet the needs and i guess that brings me to a second reason of being dubious but also um knowing that it's politically urgent is uh because um the idea of the carceral state so if we're gonna decolonize criminology or decolonize carceral policy where does that begin and end because it certainly isn't only the laws that are on the books it certainly isn't only prisons as you mentioned Ali and um it isn't only the history books and how we think about these institutions in the past but then it isn't even only carceral policy i mean where do we you know and um professor about the charia's um talk earlier about public health um there's a way to frame public health as an alternative way of thinking about how to drive social policy but then there's also a way of thinking of public health as an extension of carceral policy and i think that came across really well in that talk and it gets us to think you know can we solve can we only decolonize carceral policy and i think this also came up with a comment about you know can we deal with carceral policy in india without dealing with cost and in what order or in what constellation do we have to bring these conversations together and i guess that is the that is the problematic that we're faced with with i think also professor about the charia mentioned this in that same exact panel we're faced with with all social movements and in making the um the comparison with abolition it's not a destination it's a process of unpicking and working and constantly reviewing the downsides to any thing that looks transformative um so i suppose i just wanted to highlight the the idea that it's you know it raises more questions which i think are predict productive ones that we need to take seriously but also in different places the answers to these questions might be quite different and how they overlap with other movements and other frame frames of these movements will be quite different so i'm i'm looking forward to that kind of conversation thanks um i will keep it brief so i think a lot of the thoughts i've had have kind of been expressed in different ways i think one of the things that um has come out really clearly clearly over the last couple of days and that has kind of um really got me thinking and that's been highlighted um already by the panel is that complexity and how all of these questions and possibly answers very indifferent spaces and in different locations but i think regardless of that all of the kind of uh the thing that brings all of those different contexts together is the history of the colonial history is the processes the ideologies around that and actually the role of um criminal justice systems and institutions in reinscribing or kind of reaffirming colonial power after the dismantling of kind of empire so i think that's the thing that possibly draws all of those things together and i think i thought i knew what that looked like before the last couple of days and my paper is now this full of lots of notes of me trying to kind of bring all of the discussions that we've had over the last couple of days together because it's really kind of um perhaps changed but one of the things that really struck me over the last couple of days and kind of um i suppose for me was a really visual representation of all these things that we're talking about the kind of history and the process and the ideology the geography the space the the um all of those things was um emily russell's paper yesterday one of the panels where she had uh geo reference to think she called it which was like putting the later process i'm not familiar with but putting kind of contemporary geographical kind of measurements onto an old plantation map in the asam region on one of the old tea plantations and so she what she what she was able to show through that process was um to kind of map the contemporary state violence and trust and distrust in policing directly to specific locations on that plantation map and it really struck me as being a kind of wow this is what what what we're talking about but this is what it looks like that was a really striking moment for me for the last couple of days that kind of draws on the first things to get Vanessa, are you okay? Sure thank you all for being here me well we have a little echo um but i'll just go on um it's just on this side it'd be fine i'm very sorry um to not be able to be there in person um with you all and thank you so much for inviting me and um to um for the possibility to be in conversation with such great um colleagues um and obviously also the people who joined the conference and participated at the conference and all of us thank you so much for organizing this um to you and folks that were involved in organizing this conference and particularly also um folks who are doing the labor that's often invisibilized and really thrilled um to be in conversation with you and I'm speaking to you from the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people who defend their communities against settler colonialism on an everyday basis and care for these lands and I think it's very crucial that um to understand abolitionist struggle as struggles as against settler colonialism also in its continuing forms right and there's a I don't know I I recently saw this on on social media and unfortunately I forgot the name who posted it but it was retreated many many times and I find it quite crucial to say well everyone wants to decolonize everything now except of the colony and I think that's um that's a quite important reminder so when when you asked about some of the reflections on the relationship between decolonization and criminalized and criminal justice what actually came to mind was Ruth Wilson Gilmore's reminder that mass incarceration as one articulation of racial capitalism right um is class war and to build on that I would say criminal justice is a racialized class project and thereby also is class war um but I would like to talk about this a bit in more depth by also also maybe following up on what Eddie said to really think about what we actually mean when we talk about decolonization and also how it is mobilized hegemonically right especially with regards to the articulations of neoliberal racial capitalism so when I think of decolonization um this is directly linked not just to an epistemological project but to what people have been doing um in their struggle towards to build life to build life affirming politics and structures and to get rid of the economic political epistemological systems and exploitative systems that actually dehumanize and super exploit and abandon um the majority of of the world the majority actually of the people on on this planet so with decolonization all all kinds of forms of anti-colonial politics come to mind as well as anti-colonial revolutions and the Haitian revolution I think is one of the abolitionist cornerstones if we think of it through history which was a radical revolution aiming at the abolition of the plantation economy as well as of the system on which exploitative economies depend upon and I think that's very crucial in terms of the holistic approach right so it's not just one institution it's not just one articulation that that produces premature death but it's actually an holistic approach like Eddie also um um was pointing to that that looks at the the interconnection of the system of of violence and expropriation and exploitation so um another example is of course the general strike of enslaved people um in the US during the civil war um that W.E.B Du Bois has famously argued in black reconstruction that black enslaved people are not only workers but that he has furthermore shown that enslaved people constantly struggled against their masses over working conditions as well as legal and social statuses and during the civil war um enslaved people increasingly ran away took up arms against their masters and intentionally sabotaged and disrupted the global cotton production and these actions of course were not accidents but there were a form of abolitionist politics and I think what's really important that it was not just about dismantling and getting rid of the plantation economy to then be transitioned into the label wage relation but to actually dismantle the system that requires enslavement that requires um colonialism and that now requires or produces neoliberalism so the strike that led to the formal abolition of enslavement was aimed at abolishing the system that makes enslavement possible colonial possible colonialism possible etc and I'm referring to these two examples and we can draw on much more um examples it was already said on the panel that there are so many variations of colonialism and also empire um but I think when we when we look at some of these accounts historical roadmap um and there are many others in terms of the various anti-colonial revolutions um then I think it becomes more clear that decolonization is as France has um has also argued a phenomenon um and a politics of dismantling and he really called it violence right that decolonization is always a violent process and I think it's important to name that that doesn't mean just physical violence but it means undoing in a very radical way um the systems and institutions that particularly but not exceptionally um uh render vulnerable and disposable and killable the racialized segments of the working class and working poor populations all over the world um and of course the um the the current dominant conjuncture of decolonization instead shows that it is not understood as an add-on right like you can decolonize the curriculum as an integrationist project you can decolonize I don't know the anti-discrimination uh boards policy boards you can decolonize all kinds of documents and structures um and it's just the kind of integration into the status quo right um into the existing system um to also diversify the processes of exploitation and the processes of of dehumanization um so I think that's why I think it's really important to stick to the kind of materialist struggle of decolonization when we think about um decolonization and also think about the layers of violence that Fanon was actually pointing to right and and saying that we can understand it in many sense of the term here and and maybe two other points one was that um whereas Fanon and and many others of these kind of anti-colonial revolutionaries understood decolonization as a violent process and thereby also as a kind of event I think it were particularly um anti-colonial feminists and radical anti-racist feminists who um actually conceptualized and argued what Eddie already mentioned in terms of decolonization being a process right it's not an event one big large event um it's not something out there it's not something in the future it's something that people are doing on an everyday basis um and life in rehearsal as as Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls it right it's the practice of of life in rehearsal um which also shows that radical transformation is rather a process than an event and I think this understanding of decolonization already points to the problematic of assuming that criminal justice can be rendered more just or can be decolonized because the concept of criminality as well as the criminal justice system itself is deeply entrenched in the systemic logic of control super exploitation and dehumanization we just have to think of the employment of police law politicization shaft in the 16th century in Europe and I think that's important when we talk about racial capitalism as we learned from from cyber grab and that it not just started right with the expansion of Europe uh to the continent of Africa or to the occupation and major genocide in the america and mass genocide in the americas but itself already was operating within Europe against roma against uh polish people and what have you that's not just a part of capitalism is racial but all of it is racial and within that process um with the constitution of politicization shaft for instance as the break of at the break of the feudal order the the the function of criminality was to recruit the the poor masses into a kind of condition into a kind of system and also criminalize their means of survival right of survival in conditions of of of mass poverty and I think these two functions criminalization of survival as well as recruitment into exploitation are still two of the functions we see that the criminal justice system is still doing of course this has breaks I'm not talking historical lineage here um but if we think about the role for instance um that criminalization plays as a mode of control and as a mode of of dehumanization if we think of the role criminal justice um as a practice right criminal criminalization as a practice played in terms of capturing controlling measuring exploiting black enslaved people and and thereby also recruiting them into the system of super exploitation as enclavement and and also of course other forms of colonization and that's where I would say there is no coming together of criminal justice which is so deeply rooted in an understanding of security that as marx has said is actually the understanding of the or the main principle of the bourgeois society right that's kind of understanding of security which is deeply related to property relations deeply related to the systems of super racialized super exploitation and abandonment so I would rather say um in terms of the relation that this is an antagonistic relation the relation between criminal justice and decolonization that does not mean and that's why I find it important to to think of it as a process in terms of abolition that does not mean that people should not struggle for abolitionist reform within these kinds of justice criminal justice um arrangements right but maybe we'll talk about the difference between um abolitionist reforms and reformist reforms or so-called non-reformist reforms and uh and reformist reforms more further I just wanted to um actually make like argue that I think even this kind of um bringing together the question of of is uh is the criminal justice system decolonizable I would say it's actually not if we take decolonization seriously thank you thanks so much Vanessa um so I'm going to ask me one more question uh but I really because I really do want to open it up to the audience I think you will have far more interesting questions to ask um I just wanted to kind of build on this idea of the inability to decolonize um an inherently colonial concept or set of structures um and I wondered if this idea of uh the problem of decolonizing criminal justice translates to the question of decolonizing criminology um and the criminal question um because you know a lot of people would synonymize decolonizing criminology with southernizing criminology and this idea of um really diversifying what we mean when we say crime um understanding that crime is a colonial construct in itself so in in that regard we could argue that decolonizing criminology is actually a useful way of unpacking what crime means how colonial histories colonial legacies still inform how we understand crime a gang how we understand these kind of concepts um and so in that sense decolonizing criminology almost seems worthwhile um but then I'll leave you with a quote by Franz Fanon who said okay so comrades let us not pay tribute to criminology by creating a decolonized version of the discipline or indeed anything else that draws its inspiration from her humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation which would be almost sort of seen caricature so with that in mind I wondered what you think are the limitations of decolonizing criminology um or whether these limitations you know are beyond the purview of what decolonization uh can remedy that wants to go first yeah Lisa yeah um yeah I think I would agree with Fanon in the sense that criminology is inherently a racist discipline it's kind of born out of a biological understanding that's heavily racialized around what a criminal is um and all of our understandings that kind of come from that premise so even though there's been efforts to shift away from the kind of biological basis of the discipline it we always kind of come back to it and of course the kind of the eugenics and the the more kind of more recent versions of that and twin studies and adoption studies and all those kind of things so that keep us coming back to that and even when we're not talking about biology we're still pathologizing particular um behaviors um and there's not really a serious um undertaking within the discipline apart from kind of in in small pockets of work that centralize kind of uh race within criminology and and understandings of the kind of it's always um framed in terms of elevated offending rather than social control and um so so yeah so I would yeah I don't I don't I don't think so I think there is a turn increasingly towards prisons and policing as areas of study within criminology and particularly if you look at degree programs within different universities and what students have access to as criminology students it's very much centered around policing and prisons with a view to perhaps school in future criminal justice practitioners rather than engage in a resustained critique of their operation or the way that they maintain racialized relations within society yeah so I think for all of those reasons um um I wonder if Anna you might disagree being author of Decolonizing and I wondered how you kind of navigate these tensions uh well so the so we have quite a a lot of discussions with the my my colleague Enrique Carvalho, Rastaza Chamberlain and Maximo Soso about this idea of what you know what is decolonizing criminology and what criminology is in a sense because uh you know it it has been traditionally uh an an assemblage of uh different disciplines sociology anthropology law and I I I do I do agree absolutely with with Lisa and and this is uh you know what I said at the beginning that you know there there is such a heritage right to the discipline thinking about for instance the work of Dombroso and from Dombroso onwards um you know thinking about whether criminology has a future in a decolonial future it's a bit like thinking about for instance the discipline of anthropology right that had the same or or or similar tensions uh problems, problematics around um the orientalization of whole populations and the legitimizing legitimization of a racialized oppression uh and and you know part of anthropology can't escape that but I think there has been quite a lot of rethinking of of the discipline uh perhaps in the last five uh uh decades and I think that's that's a work that for criminologies arrive a little bit late uh but I think from different angles there are quite a lot of you know pushbacks that you know we can think about semiology and starting to look at the idea of of crime as as the object of criminology uh and questioning and interrogating that object so there has been a a range of strands within the discipline uh and perhaps from kind of non-orthodox areas of of of discipline that have been I think really healthy in starting this conversation uh so I think there is a future there's a conflict of interest here because if we if we uh kind of end criminology I I lose my job so but no aside from that I mean it's um so so I'm thinking in the the kind of the the the the the debates within anthropology that has happened that that perhaps are taking up uh in in similar ways from different perspectives I think probably I would when I'm thinking about it I tend to think of it as kind of using the scholarship that's developed around decolonizing and drawing decolonizing principles that can help us to enforce some of those kind of perspectives to help us to understand it in different ways but possibly not to claim that we can decolonize the discipline itself but perhaps there are principles within the scholarship that we can draw on to kind of undo some of the the kind of harms that have perpetuated through our understandings of crime and justice and systems and all of those things perhaps maybe any or Vanessa who wants to come in um maybe I'll just go really quickly just to pick up on the anthropology thing so I I'm an anthropologist um I guess I don't know if I am I'm in a law faculty and but I have the same consternation with anthropology both feeling like in you know in the age that we live in um it it can hold certain types of questions that legal question you know that the law faculties may not be able to hold in an academic sense but then when I think about what Vanessa said to meaningfully decolonize something what would it take for us to be actually have integrity around what that means I don't think um anthropology even today the critical anthropology could could could sustain something that would that we could then call a decolonial anthropology and I'm okay with that because it's it's also about disciplines and what they mean in higher education so it is called a discipline and it is uh it is there to kind of and don't use this term lightly but to kind of police the the way that we are allowed to put things out into the world and how seriously they're taken so that is a part a part of the structures of higher education and I think that's worthy of um a broader critique but I think I think we have to decide whether you know calling something decolonial is the critique that also will incorporate a critique of the way that we've structured higher education or whether we're using it as a vehicle for reforming from inside in which case we might as well just call it kind of a socio legal uh or socio a sociological um you know criticism of the discipline from inside of it which I don't think rises to the level of something that we should call decolonial so it's okay that it cuts off the future of criminology maybe it's just that education and the way that we think about knowledge will be different in in that future world and maybe to um to add on that because I mean obviously all um all this every discipline has these colonial implications right I mean from anthropology to also sociology if we think of the the pathologization of the the urban poor in Chicago often racialized and how for instance also black sociologists have countered this but also literature the humanities medicine so I think this is a question that is obviously again not just addressing criminology and I would rather detach from a term like decolonizing a discipline first of all because disciplines are also um as Katherine Kittrick reminds us they have an empire function in terms of how they compartmentalize um knowledge right so interdisciplinarity is so important and that's why we see that in in liberation studies for instance interdisciplinarity meaning drawing on um specific specific um and grounded forms of knowledge and the various genres they actually by by which these knowledges are shaped and disciplining disciplines disciplines actually cut off that process to even think um as entangled for instance or as being in relation so I think there's a crucial paradox and when we try to decolonize one discipline because within the process of decolonization we would smash discipline um that doesn't mean that people cannot have a particular interest but disciplinarity itself is part of colonial knowledge production um so this is one thought um that that comes um to mind and I think the other um relates to the question of these interrogations often from people in in in the third world context today called so called global self um that we're actually interrogating um anthropology um sociology and and other like disciplines by also writing back right and I think it's important to acknowledge that and it's important to also name this as a form of crucial of radical critique and interrogation but I don't I don't think we have to frame it as decolonization because decolonization is not just uncovering and dismantling something um like abolition but it's actually building something and I don't know what um the building of criminology for instance in the measures of of the liberated future would actually be so it's so if we look at okay it's the the attempt or the aim or the project is to interrogate the colonial histories and presences of these discipline I think that's that's critical and necessary and urgent and people are doing this even like all the people on the panel is like what is um our interest and our our project and at the same time I think because decolonization is also a multi-temporal um project that is also looking towards the future while maybe looking back um I think their criminology does not really have um a huge contribution to play in that's okay because I hope that in a liberated um world we would do knowledge production and education completely different and that would also mean abolish the discipline. Thanks so much Vanessa. Do you have any um replies to that or should we go to the audience for some questions? Yeah um if anyone has a question please raise your hand. Nick is one of our amazing volunteers at the back is going to I'll get a few. But dreadfully it is of course a comment not a question but um isn't it the case and I know all the panel have kind of said this that really institutionalized knowledge production for us is in is so deeply embedded in the will to conquer the world which is really what you know Vanessa's just been saying but um the tricky bit for criminology is it's not only about the conquering but the contemporary administering of the violent world now not all disciplines have that the anthropology is a bit off the hook aren't they because all their worst crimes in the past criminology is still doing some pretty horrible violence now so I think I just feel like that that brings some other challenges which are not not that we're not all engaged in them and it's easy I'm not criminologist but I wonder if we should speak a little bit to each other about how we envisage the role of knowledge production in freeing us all. Of course you know because critique is easier isn't it but the imagining of the next world which I think is neither disciplinary or probably in the institutional structures of knowledge we have have been trying to persuade people that however ugly our current conditions of knowledge production are we do need to know things together you know that the world we want to the reason why our class enemies want to collate all of the culture and history and resources is because there's some power in knowing the world but I wonder if decolonization is the most helpful metaphor language of thinking of what our collective liberatory knowledge production might be given you know the decolonization is one bit of it to position ourselves in terms of what our repertoire of knowledge production is anyway there's a very long comment I'm sorry I'm never going to do that again I've let people actually ask questions then. Thanks so much Gorgie we're going to take two more in this round and then. Thank you and thank you everybody for what you've said so far I suppose in terms of the framing I was thinking kind of is it more useful to kind of use the framing of Angela Davis of kind of is criminal justice obsolete and if not how can we make it so and then kind of beyond that in dealing with broader kind of you know what what we can see of the crimes of colonialism what sort of process of of world making can we envision that allow for kind of the radical redistribution of wealth and power necessary and you know reparations without relying on those colonial institutions or international institutions they exist today and kind of how previous attempts to do that have failed partly because they have relied on those like trying to emulate those structures if that makes sense oh and also the queen is there. There's just a lot of anti-imperial decolonialism which seems to be actually done. Good evening thank you so much to all the panelists for your very thoughtful and intriguing reflections and questions I have two questions for you much related to the question before me on decolonizing criminal justice I think it forces us to rethink out about our conception of safety considering that a lot of our beliefs about safety derived from colonial threats to white supremacy and so as we are rethinking that I guess my question is how do we advance the conversation to creating a space to interrogate what those new paradigms are for safety and then my second question is a lot of our conversation is around criminal justice and holding people which is essentially holding people accountable for our conceptions of what crime is but where in that accountability structure do we hold colonial powers accountable for their crimes? Thanks Jasmine should we take some answers from those three questions now and then we'll do another another round and while you're thinking again I guess it's usually you say about like crimes of colonialism because then J.M. Moore speaks about how useful is criminology when we talk about things like slavery which were legal they weren't criminal in the legal sense so yeah thanks for these questions and comments if you want to kick something feel free to answer any of them yeah I mean I just want to to come back because these questions have to do with the with the question of power ultimately and come back to you know some of the ideas that have been already talked during the the conference around practices of care practices of love and you know at the grass root level you know radical trauma as a framework to understand individual actions and this is of course super powerful and it's kind of this idea that Vanessa was mentioning about the practices of people ordinary people you know going about their own life every day it's not any utopia but it's just you know the the the everyday practices my and many you know and and this is why I think the the idea of the organization is in part political because it's it builds on this radical but perhaps you know banal practices in in the sense of being practices that people engage with to sustain their everyday life and to connect with each other and to ensure basic levels of of safety and livelihood my my my perhaps interrogation is kind of a push back around those thinking about the the importance of of of them is you know where is the state right and if we think about the state as fundamentally you know oppressive institution right how how do we because it seems to me that there is a fragile basis if there is no kind of power in built in this practice I don't know I'm just thinking through my my thoughts in in a way but you know it's what is the question of what do we do with with power ultimately there's always going to be you know we live in a you know world that no matter how equal it is there's always going to be power relations so it's it's the question of you know what's different institutions we recreate to support these these practices of care thanks Anna thank you um I just want to say really quickly for the on the first part of your other question which was the framework of our is criminal justice obsolete I've always been I mean the book is a great book I've always been confused about the concept of criminal justice being obsolete though because it's serving its purpose it continues to serve its purpose which is to reproduce these colonial kind of frames and it it I think there's a danger in adopting that as a paradigm unless the real impetus behind that is to say you know it's doing damage because I think the active damage that the criminal justice um you know thinking and carceral logic does is uh is maybe better articulated by something approaching you know um you know a radical interrogation of of criminal justice but yeah I don't know what to replace kind of this radical I don't know what other you know words to use other than radical rethinking of criminal justice um and then the second part of the second question which was about holding colonial powers to account I think that's a really interesting one because it does go to the point that you know it it might not take something that resembles what we think of now as a crime for what's articulated as an international you know crime under the Rome statue all these legal you know the legal trappings that we give to it doesn't necessarily map on to and infrequently maps on to a real moral ethical sensibility about what you know what justice looks like so it might be that um those are two different questions it's kind of like we can be we can completely we can aim to completely unravel criminal justice as we know it and still think of a way to address you know global responsibility for you know for oppression but I think that's just the the big visionary questions like what comes next yeah again just kind of falling on from eddie's point there um around the criminal justice system being obsolete and I think there's a and that kind of concept of how we understand justice and I think there's a real tension between kind of the bigger questions around how we conceptualize these things and then the actually very immediate questions about safety and going back to the idea of safety there's the there's the conceptual work to do but there's also the very immediate question of how to keep people safe within a system that we're nowhere near dismantling and and and kind of you know the day before we all started discussing these issues two miles down the road a young man being shot dead by the metropolitan police chris caber and that's not an isolated incident you know this is this is something that that happens frequently perhaps not uh in the context of shooting but deaths following police contact in this country disproportionately uh chris caber was a young black man disproportionately affect black men in this country um so I think you know we need to think about some of these immediate questions around uh actual safety as well as how we reconceptualize it and that's really where I struggle between the the kind of thinking and the ideas that we're talking about in terms of uh decolonization and abolition and actually I don't expect to see um any kind of abolition in the me in any meaningful sense in my lifetime and in fact all of the kind of global politics suggest the opposite at the moment so I think we also have to do some work about thinking about safety in the real world context and how we can engage to um interventions that undermine the structures that are already there in ways that keep people safe in the current moment as well as conceptualizing it and thinking about what it might mean in the future because what do we mean by future and I just think that we have to perhaps um engage with some of that thinking immediately actually um rather than leaving it for a future that possibly none of us in this room will will ever see and I think that's where um that's kind of my issue in my work kind of figuring that out to to figuring out the difference between what props up the system and what keeps people safe and that for me I've kind of reached a point actually where I feel that if if something um that we that we propose in terms of how we minimize harm and keep people safe within the current system um prevents the next Chris Cabba prevents a young man being traumatized from repeated stop and searchers cut somebody's sentence I think those things cannot be seen to undermine abolitionist thinking if actually there is some real world immediate safety for somebody if that's just one person I think that that matters as much as the ideas I just wanted to say that because I do have to to leave in a couple of minutes so I know that's kind of deviating slightly from the question but I do sometimes feel concerned and I started my area of research very much from an activist perspective so as I do have some concerns that that um we do need to do the thinking but we also have to do the work of keeping people safe in the current moment and so there's perhaps a danger of over theorizing the future sometimes that takes us away from the current moment and what is happening and what we can do in that moment and we've seen some real great examples of that over the last couple of days as well but we don't necessarily have to call it abolition or decolonizing always because I think the other thing that that does is it excludes people from the conversation it excludes communities excludes activists because the work that they're doing has been going on for a long time before we were developing a scholarship in the immediate context and they might not recognize it as doing the work of abolition but that's what they have been doing and I just think yeah I think sometimes we just have to think that's all about the the immediate context that was a little bit repetitive towards the end no not too I think we touched on this in a in our panel on abolition about we heard from Iona Taylor who talks about the role of care and abolition and what she's doing is she's an abolitionist but she's doing things every day from the everyday abolition and it's not just about a theoretical pipe dream it's a you know she is practicing abolition by you know collectively forming the systems of care so I think these questions of kind of theorizing versus practicing or maybe those distinctions aren't that that anyway are really important. Vanessa did you have anything to say about these to these questions that we heard? Yeah thank you, great question. I think I mean I would completely agree the people are doing the work and often they are and those of us who consider themselves abolitionists I think like being an abolitionist is always also working with the people and being in solidarity with the people and most of the folks who are doing this in university are also doing it outside of it so I think that's really important because it was never just I don't even consider it a university debate or a university discussion right because it is grounded in practices of liberation historically as well as in the present and I think that's where we see also in these times of multiple crises of racial capitalism and times of catastrophe people are doing the work and I think that's very very important to also consider the winds right it was the global black spring that even inspired so many movements to engage further with abolition like the German context that is actually the context when very much politically grounded and work with a lot of abolitionist groups we have seen so many new movements and new alliances working trans-nationally internationally like really pushing against border regimes, castle regimes, regimes of psychotrization and at the same time we see a lot of like organizing now even with with labor movements if we think of the US having so many labor struggles since like we haven't seen this since a long time so I think it's also really important to see the possibilities in these moments that are now emerging and that have so much to do with struggling and defending a politics of life and I think that's what what abolition is about right a lot of people don't call it that way but that's actually what a lot of folks are doing all over the world as Ruth Wilson-Girma often reminds us in terms of the questions thank you so much for these I find it crucial the question on education because of course we still need to know and I think there are a lot of great historical examples like the freedom schools like like the popular learning spaces all around the world often connected to anti-colonial projects where we saw that we have I think models of thinking of education in really different radically different ways as not an institution that actually reproduces the social inequalities and also the nationalist and racist capitalists inequalities we're coming up against but rather to really have radical democratic popular places or structures where people can come together to learn and engage collectively in the process of learning and I'm always inspired when I talk with youth about these questions like also what they actually want to learn and I find it inspiring how many even young children or youth I know would say I would like to learn why my friend has asthma I would like to learn how to take care of communities in this situation and in this conjuncture of climate catastrophe not crisis catastrophe like people need skills and knowledge of climate education right is such a crucial is such a crucial knowledge project to engage with or children indigenous projects that engage with working and respecting the land I think we have so many models out there that could inspire how education could be radically transformed and then maybe one other point and that's on the point of of holding accountable because I do know also in the UK and the question of what makes us safe people are really doing the work abolitionist futures sisters uncuts and many many other groups and collectives that are already struggling around these questions what makes us really safe right starting from social infrastructures that are not nationalist designs but that are actually transnational and that what people actually need to feel safe right but it needs social infrastructures and some and in the abolitionist I would say in in terms of abolitionist activists we have debates around what roles should and Kansas states should play in these in these configurations and in these projects right I think because there are various strands also of radical abolitionism some rather drawing maybe on anarchist ideas others rather drawing on socialist ideas I think we have to figure it out obviously it needs kind of infrastructures but I'm also a bit like the connection between the state and nationalism is so strong that we we know we need these global infrastructures which could also be maybe a form of commenting or we we have to struggle through this right and then in terms of the question of accountability and thank you so much for for that question I think it's definitely important to continue and to even scale up the resistance of of challenging and and and holding accountable the the colonial former colonial powers and particularly the major capitalist states of the of the north if we just think for instance of what of the flooding in Pakistan like we have to hold the state accountable in terms of climate reparation right now and I think this is also an abolition this is part of abolition right as Ruth Wilson Gilmour often says is abolition is red and it's green and it's international and of course with this comes the the resistance to state and also the the struggle to to hold states accountable particularly in this time of of continuing crisis thanks thanks so much Vanessa and I'm really sorry I would have loved to take more questions but I'm being told that there are 150 people waiting outside for an event at seven turns out so I have very very strict turnarounds for for events crammed events planning but I just want to thank all of our speakers one one more time Anna Eddie Lisa and Vanessa for such an engaging and wonderful talk and thanks