If we are to make some advances in international criminology, we need to face the fact that, historically, criminological knowledge has often been used as a support of colonial and authoritarian rule and acknowledge that also today international criminologists operate by and large in a culturally ill-informed vacuum in which a ‘universal’ validity of Western theories is implicitly taken for granted. Starting from Edward Said’s famous critique of the ‘orientalism’ of Western academics and Achille Mbembe’s notion of ‘black reason’, we will investigate how bottom-up ethnographies and cultural anthropological debates on cultural ‘landscapes’ could help to decolonise criminology. In conclusion, it is argued that a culturally informed international criminology is not based on humanitarian do-gooderism or shame over a colonial past, but that it is fundamental if we are to understand the world around us and indeed the ‘glocal’ questions we are confronted with.

This essay analyses the way people from different social classes in Guatemala City respond to the versatility of dangers, uncertainties and anxieties they tend to live with on a daily basis. More specifically, it focuses on withdrawal, the main theme that arises in this regard. Three forms are distinguished: withdrawal from ’the dangerous other’, nostalgic withdrawal ‘in time’ and withdrawal ‘from the body’. They all build on the same logic, while being fed by the violence and structural violence people are confronted with.

This article argues that the contemporary conceptualization and the framing of fake news reflect an almost purely western perspective prompted by western crises such as the Brexit or the 2016 US election. To provide an account of fake news in non-western context, the article follows a situated knowledge approach to explore the fake news phenomena In Egypt. The article concludes that fake news has been used as an authoritarian practice to limit access to information and as an illiberal practice to penalize any other voice or opinion against the government relying on the penal code.

Along with the rich and often tumultuous history, the state of Jammu and Kashmir has also experienced enforced disappearances, giving birth to another category of victims as a consequence of political conflict – the half-widows of Kashmir. The term ‘half-widows’ describes women whose husbands have disappeared but not yet been declared dead. The article proposes to analyse the orchestrated-limbo, defined by the intersectionality and compounding of how stigma, shaming and violence take shape in the context of gender relations in India. It seeks to answer how and why an implicit western lens may fall short in understanding criminological problems outside the western realm.

The purpose of this article is to examine criminal justice within the context of legal system diversity. This study aims to identify, within the context of legal cultural diversity, the main challenges that need to be overcome in order to restore peace in an indigenous community in Brazil, more specifically in the case known as the ‘first indigenous jury’ in the country. In the study, it was perceived that the Brazilian official legal system was unable to restore peace because there was no egalitarian dialogue between different legal cultural systems in interpreting the fundamental human rights at stake.