This book is the first green criminology text to focus specifically on Latin America. Green criminology has always adopted a broad horizon and explicitly emphasised that environmental crimes and harms affect countries and cultures around the world. The chapters collected here illuminate and describe the “theft of nature” and the “poisoning of the land” in Latin America through and from processes of agro-industry expansion, biopiracy, legal and illegal trafficking of free-born non-human animals, and mining. An interdisciplinary study, this collection draws on research from a wide range of international experts on not only green criminology, but also social justice, political ecology and sociology. An engaging and thought-provoking work, this book will be an essential text for anyone interested in current issues in environmental crime.

Criminology has focused mainly on problems of crime and violence in the large population centres of the Global North to the exclusion of the global countryside, peripheries and antipodes. Southern criminology is an innovative new approach that seeks to correct this bias. This book turns the origin stories of criminology, which simply assumed a global universality, on their head. It draws on a range of case studies to illustrate this point: tracing criminology’s long fascination with dangerous masculinities back to Lombroso’s theory of atavism, itself based on an orientalist interpretation of men of colour from the Global South; uncovering criminology’s colonial legacy, perhaps best exemplified by the over-representation of Indigenous peoples in settler societies drawn into the criminal justice system; analysing the ways in which the sociology of punishment literature has also been based on Northern theories, which assume that forms of penalty roll out from the Global North to the rest of the world; and making the case that the harmful effects of eco-crimes and global warming are impacting more significantly on the Global South. The book also explores how the coloniality of gender shapes patterns of violence in the Global South. Southern criminology is not a new sub-discipline within criminology, but rather a journey toward cognitive justice. It promotes a perspective that aims to invent methods and concepts that bridge global divides and enhance the democratisation of knowledge, more befitting of global criminology in the twenty-first century.

This edited collection is grounded in a green criminological approach to understand whether the law, both in effect and implications, reflects, refracts, or sublimates the social, political and ecological conditions of our times. Since its initial proposal in the 1990s, green criminology has focused the criminological gaze on a wide array of harms and crimes affecting humans, animals other than humans, ecological systems, and the planet as a whole. As a continuously blossoming field of criminological inquiry, green criminology recognizes and examines behaviours that are both illegal and legal (yet detrimental), and in varying ways has made great efforts to provide insight into harms in a more fulsome manner. At the same time, there have been many significant legal instances, domestic, and international, including case law, legislation, regulation, treaties, agreements and executive directives which have troubled the law’s understanding of green harms, illegal and legal activity, pushing legal boundaries in the process. Recognizing that humanity and nature are inextricably integrated, Green Criminology and the Law reflects the range and depth of high-quality research and scholarship, combining contributions from established scholars willing to explore new topics and recent entrants who are breaking new scholarly ground.

This volume aims to provide a resource for thinking about green criminology, a rapidly developing field. It provides focused discussions of current and cutting edge issues that will influence the emergence of a coherent perspective on green issues.

In little more than a decade, Green Criminology has become an established new perspective in the field. It embraces an exciting and wide range of topics, from controversies about genetic modification through corporate offending against the environment and human communities, to animal abuse. Green Criminology provides a focal point for longstanding and new areas of research as well as making important interdisciplinary connections.

Southern Green Criminology focuses on the threat the western world poses to the rest of the globe, and how Western imposed ideas of progress are damaging the planet, especially the southern hemisphere.

Academic and general interest in environmental crimes, harms, and threats, as well as in environmental legislation and regulation, has grown sharply in recent years. The Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology is the most in-depth and comprehensive volume on these issues to date. With contributions from leading international green criminologists and scholars in related fields, the Handbook examines a wide range of substantive issues, including: climate change corporate criminality and impacts on the environment environmental justice media representations pollution (e.g. air, water) questions of responsibility and risk wildlife trafficking The chapters explore green criminology in depth, its theory, history and development, as well as methodological concerns for this area of academic interest. With examples of environmental crimes, harms, and threats from Africa, Asia, Australia, Eastern Europe, South America, the United Kingdom, and the United States, this book will serve as a vital resource for international scholars and students in criminology, sociology, law and socio-legal studies, as well as environmental science, environmental studies, politics and international relations.