Using theory from the Global South: From social cohesion and collective efficacy to ubuntu
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806231221744 |
| Author | Bill Dixon |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
Using theory from the Global
South: From social cohesion
and collective efficacy to ubuntu
Bill Dixon
University of Nottingham, UK
Abstract
Criminologists adopting a southern or decolonial perspective bemoan the failure to
use theories from the Global South in making sense of crime and responses to it.
This article takes the African philosophy and ethics of ubuntu and demonstrates
how they might be used to ground a more relevant and effective approach to prevent-
ingurbanviolenceinSouthAfricathannorthernideasaboutsocialcohesionandcol-
lective efficacy current in dominant policy discourses. It argues that using indigenous
bodies of knowledge like ubuntu can contribute not just to making good some of the
damage done by colonial epistemicides but may also offer workable solutions to con-
temporary social problems in and beyond the Global South.
Keywords
indigenous knowledge, social cohesion, South Africa, southern theory, ubuntu
Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest
and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the
mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived them-
selves and their relationship to the world.
(Ngũgı
̃wa Thiong’o, 1986: 16)
Corresponding author:
Bill Dixon, School of Sociology and Social Policy, Lawand Social Sciences Building, University Park, University of
Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK.
Email: william.dixon@nottingham.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2024, Vol. 28(3) 267–286
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/13624806231221744
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Introduction
The era of military conquest and political dictatorship may be over, but their impact on
the mental universe of the formerly colonized persists. This article examines one example
of this: the use of northern ideas about community cohesion and collective efficacy in a
programme aimed at reducing levels of violence in urban South Africa. I take the decision
to prefer these ideas, and to ignore the philosophy and ethics of ubuntu with its roots in
the culture of southern Africa as an alternative, to illustrate the continuation of the dom-
inance of criminological ideas developed in the Global North. In doing so, I am not sug-
gesting that community cohesion and collective efficacy are all that the North has to offer.
Nor am I advocating the rejection of all such ideas simply by virtue of their origin.
Writing over 40 years ago, Colin Sumner (1982) remarked that mainstream crimin-
ology had little or nothing to say about the societies of the so-called underdeveloped
world. Changes in those societies were simply delayed replays of the processes of mod-
ernization familiar from the history of what we now know as the Global North. Almost
four decades on and the Nigerian criminologist, Etannibi Alemika (2020: 7) notes that,
notwithstanding the differences between North and South, ‘Existing criminological edu-
cation and practice in Africa is dominated by models developed to explain crime in
Europe and North America.’In the intervening years, others have added to Sumner’s
criticism, including Stanley Cohen (1988 [1982]) and Maureen Cain (2000). Biko
Agozino (2003: 1) was perhaps the most scathing with his lacerating description of crimin-
ology as the faithful servant of colonialism, an example of ‘imperialist reason’that has largely
escaped the ‘postcolonial critique’to which other social sciences have been subjected.
Southern and decolonial theory in criminology
Over the last 10 to 15 years, criminology has begun to take up the challenge of making
sense of crime and responses to it in non-western, southern and/or post-colonial societies.
It is possible to discern at least five substantial, distinct, but often overlapping and inter-
secting bodies of work. The first consists of high-level critiques of the dominance of the
Global North, its ideas, institutions and scholarship in and beyond the social sciences. In
this vein, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016) offers a demolition of the pretensions to
universalism embedded in much northern theorizing, and makes a resounding call for
cognitive justice in the aftermath of the epistemicides associated with colonialism.
Meanwhile, the Cameroonian scholar, Achille Mbembe (2017: 1), draws attention to
the short sightedness of continuing to ignore knowledge from the Global South at a
time when ‘Europe is no longer the centre of gravity of the world’. A second body of
work is concerned more directly with criminology, which, for Jean and John Comaroff
(2012), is very much an intellectual project of Euro-America—and one with an increas-
ingly insecure grasp on reality. In a dramatic reversal of the modernization theory found
wanting by Sumner, they argue that the Global North is evolving in ways prefigured by
the experiences of the South. The limitations of the North–South binary are evident in the
work of Elliott Currie (2017) who demonstrates the presence of the South in the North in
his dissection of the huge disparities in violent death between Whites and African-Americans,
and in Parmar et al.’s (2023) excavation of the traces of colonial racism evident in the lives of
268 Theoretical Criminology 28(3)
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