Introduction

Despite winning three consecutive elections, in 2015, in 2017 (albeit short of a majority in the House of Commons) and in 2019, the Conservative governments of these years experienced increasingly troubled times. Each pillar of the Party's ‘traditional appeal’ – stable government, sound finance and law and order – came under sustained challenge. In this chapter, the latter theme, Conservative law and order and criminal justice policies, are subjected to particular scrutiny, although powerful conflicting influences played across all three themes.

A number of momentous events undoubtedly played their destabilising parts here, including Brexit and its long-drawn-out aftermath, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing rapid escalation in energy prices, triggering, in turn, the highest inflation rates for 40 years and the cost of living crisis. But the Conservative Party also underwent a crisis, largely of its own making, resulting in a rapid turnover of leaders – prime ministers – five of whom eventually came to hold the reins of power during the eight years after 2015. Such a rapid turnover of leaders, in part reflecting factional tendencies within the Conservative Party (Guiney, 2022), including, for England and Wales, five home secretaries and seven secretaries of state for justice, inevitably had their impact upon the consistency of policy making across a wide range of areas of government, especially the criminal justice system.

As has been noted previously (Squires, 2016), while the Conservativeled Coalition government had pursued a number of consistent penal policy goals, centred on delivering austerity, managerialism and the outsourcing of criminal justice services (Skinns, 2016), the much-vaunted ‘rehabilitation revolution’ (later styled ‘transforming rehabilitation’) barely got off the ground. Less than four years into the newly outsourced community supervision arrangements, and following critical reports from both within Westminster (National Audit Office, 2019) and partner nongovernmental organisations and policy experts (Plummer, 2018; Annison, 2019), David Gauke, the fourth justice secretary in four years, announced a major policy U-turn, bringing rehabilitation services back within the national Probation Service (Schofield and Johnstone, 2019).

The struggles of our contemporary moment, the deepening of social inequalities around the world, the rise of authoritarian governments, the routine violence of corporations, state institutions and state agents, as well as the contestation of these circumstances by grassroots groups and social movements – all inspired our initial symposium at the University of Brighton in 2019. Since then, the world entered the global COVID-19 pandemic, and international struggles against racism, police violence, and structural political and economic exclusions have gathered momentum, trying to disrupt the continuum of interlocking forms of oppression. More recently, new wars have started, reminding us as we move from one conjuncture to another, that this dialogue around repression and resistance is unfinished, it is a beginning, rather than an endpoint, to moments of change.

The 25 authors – thinkers, scholars and activists – who have contributed to this volume bring their situated work to name and challenge the conditions of the current moment, in attempts to collectively unsettle and address the legacies and conditions of interconnected forms of social, racial, gendered, political and economic injustices. This is an effort to transform existing social orders. We offer an admittedly value-laden contribution to current debates in the social sciences and humanities through cross-fertilization of ideas and experiences, while challenging oppression and eurocentrism. Relatedly, we demonstrate that there is much to be learned when Southern, postcolonial and decolonizing lenses are applied to criminology and criminal justice research. Their contributions must be considered, including the perspectives of Marxist, feminist, Africana and queer scholars working in Southern contexts or Southern issues. Our contributors have engaged with many of these perspectives in their respective chapters. We hope future criminological debates will continue to challenge the epistemological inequalities and hierarchies still evident as the potent legacies of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism.

The chapters here, at their core, ask and address critical questions about ‘who has the power to label another as deviant’, ‘who makes the rules’, ‘who causes the harm’ and ‘who collects the profits’ (Agozino, 2003: 46). The aim of this task is to liberate knowledge from ‘the shackles of imperialist reason’ (Agozino, 2003: 245). This work urges us to address the conditions, crises and processes that are tied to specific developments in capitalism.

Introduction

Discussing the development of law and order in a global context, Comaroff and Comaroff (2012) have argued that our understanding of the nature and development of policing would be better informed by more fully incorporating perspectives on the operation of policing systems in the ‘global South’. They make this argument in marked contrast to what they refer to as a central assumption of Euromodernity that invariably sees the ‘global South’ as forever tracking behind the North, ‘behind the curve of universal history, always in deficit, playing catch up’ (2012: 12; Connell, 2007). Instead, they argue, ‘there is good reason to think the opposite’, for ‘[g] iven the unpredictable … dialectic of capitalism and modernity in the here and now, it is the south in which radically new assemblages of capital and labour are taking shape [prefiguring] the future of the global North’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012: 12). And of course, where capitalism, governance and refashioned social orders lead, policing systems are likely to be thoroughly implicated, a sharp reminder, discussed later in this chapter, that ‘Southern’ and colonial (weaponized, unaccountable, asymmetric) policing and security systems, far from being reformed are, in fact, lying in wait. As Bell (2013) has also argued, it is important not to see policing policy transfers as ‘uni-directional’: for often, supposedly ‘exceptional’ police practices more usually deployed in the colonies and typically ‘seen as having been particularly marked by paramilitarism’ and intensive surveillance (especially ‘widespread during the period of decolonisation as local forces sought to deal with political insurgency’ and ‘suspect populations’) have also come to be increasingly normalized within Britain itself (Bell, 2013; see also Nigam, 1990a, 1990b; Elkins, 2005; Fekete, 2013; Silvestri, 2019; Elliott-Cooper, 2021 for imperial examples). Cole also notes that one of the difficulties in assessing colonial policing resides ‘in the lack of a clear distinction between policing and military action’ and in any event, ‘most of the colonial senior police officers in Africa and Latin America were recruited directly from the imperial armies … and the majority of the police forces … were paramilitary units’ (Cole, 1999: 89).

These questions, the blurred distinctions between policing and quasimilitary force and the legacies they represent, form a central concern of the chapter.

Introduction

Discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Derek Gregory (2004: 11) assesses the imperial legacy they embody. He suggests that the ‘War on Terror’ marks ‘a violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of “us” and “them”, “civilisation” and “barbarism”, “good” and “evil” ‘. Such categories invoke the distancing that ‘otherness’ has facilitated, empowering the deployment of righteous violence against those who were neither assumed to know, nor presumed to deserve, any better. Where once this violence was orchestrated by gentlemen wearing red tunics, jodhpurs and pith helmets (cited in Sanghera, 2021), more recently it arrives with camouflaged ‘Dusty Warriors’ scrambling from the back of armoured personnel carriers (Holmes, 2007). One may be tempted to suggest that, in other respects, little has changed since these very same regions were contested in the 19th and early 20th centuries as empires fought over territories, drew lines in the sand (Barr, 2012) and the British, in particular, sought to protect overland routes (and, later, oil – Barr, 2019) from Russian and Turkish incursion, to India, the supposed ‘jewel’ in its imperial crown (Satia, 2008). For indeed, as we have seen in earlier chapters in this collection, and as a host of revisionist historical scholarship has confirmed, violence and conflict – either the military violence of warfare, genocide or massacre, or the economic violence of dispossession, enslavement and exploitation – were irretrievably enmeshed within the experience of empire (Walter, 2017). This might be the initial violence of discovery and conquest (Callwell, 1896/1996; Gott, 2011), the normalization of imperial expansion and daily rule (Dwyer and Nettelbeck, 2018; Muschalek, 2019) or the bloody struggles of withdrawal and emancipation (Elkins, 2005; Thomas, 2012).

And yet, as has been argued (see Chapter 2, this volume) the ruling narrative story is also one of increasing regulation, sometimes referred to as the ‘liberal paradox of empire’ (Dwyer and Nettelbeck, 2018; Andrews, 2021) or even of ‘liberal militarism’.

Southern perspectives in criminology: an agenda

Several chapters that make up a large part of this book began life as papers presented at a ‘Southern Perspectives’ one-day research seminar at the University of Brighton in the early summer of 2019. The purpose of the day was to draw together several academic/theoretical research and network connections to explore a range of emerging concerns relating to ‘Southern Perspectives’ in criminology and existing scholarship on colonialism and the decolonization of the criminological imagination – or, in Agozino's terms – developing a critique of ‘imperialist reason’ (Agozino, 2003).

In pursuing this agenda, the distance we might have to travel from the familiar assumptions of academic criminology was, at this early stage, less than absolutely clear to us, but we were hopeful and keen to explore. In any event, Carrington et al's remarkably concise, but wonderfully coherent and challenging, introduction to Southern Criminology (2019) had recently appeared – preceded by the enormous, free-ranging Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South (Carrington et al, 2018). These texts convinced us of the viability of criminology, a ‘rendezvous discipline’ like no other, as an appropriate vehicle for these developing enquiries. As such, the present volume builds on established and growing efforts to examine the ongoing legacies of colonialism on institutions of control and practices of ordering (Agozino, 2003; Aliverti et al, 2021). This is a book looking to facilitate dialogue between multiple critical and interdisciplinary perspectives, in particular Southern and postcolonial perspectives, through collaborations between activists, academics and intellectuals across the globe. Some years ago, Jock Young had likewise remarked that the ‘very liveliness of criminology and, at its best, its intellectual interest’ derived its place from the busy crossroads of social theory, concerned especially with order and regulation, political economy, and the state (Young, 2003: 97). Given our current concerns with postcolonial legacies, policing and violence, and the distinctive, frequently racialized, character of (in)security, (in)justice and (dis)order in Southern contexts, these seem like indispensable themes.

Introduction

In the UK in 2020, there appears to be a broad consensus in academic, media and policy discourses on the value of financial education. Youth financial education in particular, remains a strong focus of policymakers, scholars and researchers, with the general agreement being that financial education for youth is of vital importance to the long-term fiscal wellbeing of individuals, families and indeed the UK as a whole (Fox et al, 2005; Sherraden et al, 2011). As Totenhagen at al (2015) state, ‘Reaching youth before poor financial habits are established is essential for long-term financial well-being’ (p.180). As evidenced by the work of the OECD over the last 20 years, the importance of financial education for financial stability and inclusive development is globally acknowledged (Atkinson and Messy, 2013; Maman and Rosenhek, 2020).

How best to deliver financial education, what materials to include and who should be charged with this responsibility are all areas for debate in the ethical drive to optimally influence young people's financial capability. However, the real fly in the ointment of the international financial education movement is the growing body of research which suggest that it doesn't actually work. Gudmunson and Dames (2011) note that the uncomfortable conundrum in this field was how often financial knowledge actually proved ineffective as a predictor of financial behaviour or indeed change in behaviour.

This chapter draws on an analysis of recent UK financial education tools and practices produced by for-profit financial institutions. We seek to reflect on what we consider to be some of the more questionable practices involved in youth financial education in the UK. We locate these practices in broader debates about the financialisation of childhood and suggest that, while financial education is a seductive imaginary for the neoliberal age, a range of fundamental misunderstandings about financial strain and its precursors, potentially toxic constructions of childhood and an increasingly questionable commercial shaping of youth fatally wound the promise of financial education.

Financialising childhood: shaping children's subjectivities

The OECD recently stated that financial education is ‘the process by which financial consumers/investors improve their understanding of financial products, concepts and risks and, through information, instruction and/or objective advice, develop skills and confidence to become more aware of financial risks and opportunities, to make informed choices, to know where to go for help, and to take other effective actions to improve their financial wellbeing’ (Arrondel, 2018: 246).