Neo-colonial penality? Travelling penal power and contingent sovereignty
| DOI | 10.1177/14624745211025745 |
| Published date | 01 October 2021 |
| Date | 01 October 2021 |
| Author | Eva Magdalena Stambøl |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Neo-colonial penality?
Travelling penal power
and contingent
sovereignty
Eva Magdalena Stambøl
Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Freie Universit€
at
Berlin, Germany
Abstract
The article explores the relevance of neo-colonial theory for criminology, and its con-
tribution to understanding why and how penal policy and models travel from the global
North to the global South. An empirical example is employed to review arguments for
and against ‘penal neo-colonialism’ and to tease out the theory’s strengths and limita-
tions; namely the European Union’s ‘penal aid’ to shape West African countries’ penal
policies and practices to stop illicit flows and irregular mobility to Europe. The article
further discusses neo-colonial theory’s concepts of agency, power and sovereignty by
comparing them to similar poststructuralist perspectives on the ‘contingent sovereign-
ty’ of ‘governance states’. Moreover, by drawing on a theoretical discussion on state-
hood in African studies, it looks at how the sovereignty of African states has been
conceptualized as hollowed out ‘from above’ as well as ‘from below’. In doing so, the
article contributes to a recent criminological debate that has problematized the rela-
tionship between (travelling) penal power and state sovereignty.
Keywords
contingent sovereignty, European Union, Kwame Nkrumah, neo-colonial penality, penal
aid, penal power, Sahel
Corresponding author:
Eva Magdalena Stambøl, Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, Freie Universit€
at Berlin, Ihnestraße 21,
14195 Berlin, Germany.
Email: e.m.stambol@fu-berlin.de
Punishment & Society
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745211025745
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
2021, Vol. 23(4) 536–556
Introduction
Recent criminological contributions have argued that penal power can travel
beyond the nation-state, especially along postcolonial ties, thus problematizing
its relationship to state sovereignty (Bosworth, 2017; Lohne, 2020). Others have
asserted that the Western export of crime control models and the externalization of
borders to countries in the global South are embedded in neo-colonial relations of
power (e.g. Aas, 2011; Weber and McCulloch, 2019). However, ‘neo-colonial’ is
used by these authors more as a polemic device to front a political critique without
referring to any author or even definition. Aiming to explore the relevance of neo-
colonial theory for criminology and the sociology of punishment, this article asks:
how can neo-colonial theory shed light on the ways in which penal power travels
and its relationship to state sovereignty?
Neo-colonial theory (Fanon, 1965; Nkrumah, 1963, 1965; Sartre, 1964/2001),
stemming from the decades of African independences in the 1950s and 60s, focused
on the role of asymmetrical power structures and economic dependency in explain-
ing why Western policies could still be imposed on African countries despite their
juridical sovereignty. While it largely fell out of academic fashion at the end of the
Cold War, neo-colonial theory has recently re-emerged through some pertinent
contributions within the discipline of International Relations (IR) (Gegout, 2017;
Langan, 2015, 2018). Yet the theory is also, as this article seeks to illustrate, rel-
evant for criminology and the sociology of punishment. Neo-colonial theory has
the state as its unit of analysis – and explores to what extent a state’s sovereignty is
compromised by external actors’ co-option and influence: a neo-colonial country is
one which is economically dependent on aid, trade and loans from hegemonic states
in the global North or international financial institutions, which is permeated by
external actors, and where the political elites become more accountable to the
donors than to the population. Yet this article suggests that the extent of neo-
colonial co-optation may also be analysed sector-wise. As such, it discusses the
ramifications of neo-colonialism as a theoretical framework for studying external
influence in the criminal justice and penal sector, which moreover lays at the heart
of the Weberian concept of national sovereignty as monopoly of force. By also
taking into account similar poststructuralist theories on the ‘contingent sovereign-
ty’ (Duffield, 2007) of ‘governance states’ (Harrison, 2004), the article compares
and discusses different perspectives on agency, power and sovereignty with regard
to the global North’s export of ‘penal aid’ (Brisson-Boivin and O’Connor, 2013)
and penal models to the global South. Furthermore, as Western intervention into
Southern countries’ penal sectors tends to take place as part of state-building
efforts in countries labelled as ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’, the article draws on a theoretical
debate on statehood in African studies to further explore the concept of sover-
eignty and its relationship to penal power: seeing how scholars have understood
African states’ sovereignty as being hollowed out not only from ‘above’ but also
from ‘below’.
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Stambøl
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