Political Philosophy of Crime and Criminalisation

Room – ALB G.020

Koshka Duff (University of Nottingham); Paul Gorby (University of St Andrews) 

Across the political spectrum, ‘criminal’ is used as a slur. Insofar as a person is deemed criminal, they are assumed to lack political consciousness and motivation for their actions. Political philosophy has traditionally started from the perspective of the state, or in its more radical moments, the citizen; in both modes, it neglects the standpoints of criminalised subjects. 

This derogatory and depoliticising approach to ‘the criminal’ has been problematised from a variety of perspectives. Abolitionist, decolonial, and queer critiques have been sharpened by global uprisings against police violence such as Black Lives Matter. In recognising that the law is constructed and maintained for the purposes of upholding particular forms of social power – including hierarchies of race, class, gender, disability, species, and sexuality – critical theorists and movements encourage us to reassess criminalised agents as potential figures of political resistance, transformation, and liberation. 

Alongside the general depoliticisation of crime, we see an equal and seemingly opposite hyper-politicisation of certain groups deemed criminal, particularly those demonised through racially-coded categories of ‘illegal’ migration and ‘terrorism’. As critical security and migration scholars point out, however, this hyper-politicisation serves a similar purpose of excluding racial capitalism’s ‘others’ from the sphere of legitimate political contestation. 

The marginalisation of crime in political philosophy today might seem surprising when we consider how major figures in the history of political thought, from John Locke to Hannah Arendt, sought to tie together their thinking about the political and the criminal. Their interventions shaped discourses that remain relevant today, posing us the challenge of untangling their emancipatory promise from their carceral consequences. 

We propose three main avenues of inquiry for the workshop, while equally welcoming contributions that engage its themes in other ways. 

1. Criminalisation as depoliticisation

The first avenue will consider how contemporary political theories and public discourses operate to depoliticise acts and agents of criminality, and groups deemed criminal. It will question who gets labelled as criminal and why, attending to the ways criminalisation can silence and marginalise counter-normative subjects along multiple axes of oppression. Correspondingly, it will consider what roles criminalised activities, persons, and groups might play in political resistance. 

2. The criminal as enemy

The second avenue will consider framings of the criminal as social enemy – a hyper-politicisation which equally serves to exclude the criminalised from the political community. How are racist and ‘civilisational’ discourses of crime and criminality deployed to legitimise border violence, ‘counter-terror’ laws, and other securitising measures? How are tropes of the enemy within, and labels like ‘domestic extremist’ and ‘aggravated activist’, used against civil disobedients, social movements, and modes of life which challenge heteronormative racial capitalism? 

3. The criminal in the history of political thought

From Beccaria’s On Crime and Punishments and Bentham’s panopticon to Marx’s critique of the criminalised lumpenproletariat and Goldman’s anarchist ambivalence towards the ‘unfortunates’ she met in prison, notions of crime and criminalisation have long been vital to political philosophy. The workshop’s third avenue will contemplate the position of the criminal in the history of political thought, asking how centring crime and criminalisation might get us to reassess major and marginalised thinkers in the philosophical canon. 

Dual session structure: two 20-minute presentations back-to-back, 10-minute pause for reflection, 40-minute discussion session (90 minutes total)

Single session structure: 20-minute presentation, 10-minute pause for reflection, 30-minute discussion session (60 minutes total)

Roundtable structure: 10-minute presentations back-to-back from discussants, 10-minute pause for reflection, 20-minute conversation guided by Chair, 20-minute audience-inclusive discussion session (90 minutes total)