Abstract

This chapter argues that criminologists have a lot to learn from the decolonization struggles engaged in by colonized people, including people of African descent, women, the poor, and Indigenous peoples. Following the theory of imperialism as the general character of all criminality developed elsewhere (Agozino, 2003), the chapter looks at liberation fighters as paradigmatic criminologists from whom scholars in the field could learn a thing or two. Contrary to the characterization of those liberation fighters as criminals by the colonial law-and-order regimes, the chapter reconceptualizes them as scholar-activist criminologists struggling to end one of the major types of crime that criminologists tend to shy away from studying. The chapter will offer a broad political economy of criminalization and resistance of relevance to people of African descent. The chapter concludes that the concept of liberation criminology is similar to the concept of liberation sociology and that it offers power-reflexive perspectives on societal reactions to deviance with openness to contributions by all committed scholar-activists.