Criminology and Epistemic Disobedience

Introduction

This article examines how knowledge is produced within European criminology, with a focus on the intersection of the politics of punishment and the politics of knowledge. I trace how mainstream European criminology often depoliticizes incarceration by severing it from structural oppression and historical context, thereby normalizing and legitimizing genocidal practices. While critical traditions such as the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control (EGSD&SC) have long resisted this tendency, dominant institutions in the field sustain a discourse of disciplinary neutrality that obscures complicity with state violence, narrows crime to individual pathology, and constrains avenues for resistance. In short, the field’s “objective” and “neutral” reformist idiom is a feature of neoliberal governance, where a humanistic rhetoric of reform screens relations of power. Following Foucault’s insight in The Archaeology of Knowledge that disciplines are rule-bound formations determining what may be said (2002), I read criminology’s silences as effects of these rules rather than accidental omissions.

To pursue this, I draw on decolonial theories, particularly Mbembe (2019) and Mignolo (2009), as well as on Foucault’s analyses of power and knowledge (1977; 1980; 2002), to explore how decolonial thinking and practice can deconstruct humanistic-positivist knowledge production. Mignolo (2009) explains that for a very long time, the production of knowledge was based on the idea that disciplines are transparent and detached from the geo-political; from this position, they create taxonomies that classify projects, individuals, and communities into what needs to be done. While this has also been pointed out by Haraway (2013), some disciplines and scholars continue to deny that historical and geo-political conditions shape the production of knowledge. For Mignolo, resisting this denial requires what he calls epistemic disobedience: a practice of delinking from the illusion of neutrality and Eurocentric frameworks. Epistemic disobedience opens space for decolonial ways of knowing and alternative modes of being in the world. This analysis is necessarily situated and partial; I draw on my experiences as a queer researcher and psychologist from Cyprus, who has conducted studies in Cyprus, the U.S., and the UK. This trajectory enables me to explore how epistemic disobedience can be located differently across geopolitical and disciplinary contexts. To interrogate under which conditions disciplines or subfields take a position and on what issues they remain silent, I analyze two episodes: (1) the silence of the 2024 European Society of Criminology (ESC) conference in Bucharest regarding the Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine; and (2) prison scholarship that circulates “humanistic” programs in Israeli prisons as models of “less harmful” incarceration. Together, these cases show how Western academic and professional frameworks obscure and sometimes actively legitimate genocide by reducing crime to individual behavior and by equating justice with institutional reform.

Incarceration Studies as Epistemic Refusal

I view incarceration as a broader concept and experience, one shaped by systems, practices, and conditions of coercive confinement. It goes beyond physical imprisonment to include the cultural, social, and structural dynamics that normalize surveillance, confinement, and control. This framing shows how carceral states depend on dehumanization, often using tactics that mirror those employed in genocidal regimes, while making less visible forms of coercion appear ordinary. From this perspective, incarceration studies become a framework not only for analyzing prisons, but for understanding the wider systems that uphold carcerality as a tool of racial, colonial, and economic domination. Following Brown and Schept’s (2016) call for critical carceral studies that resist criminology’s alignment with state power and reformist logics, I approach incarceration studies not as a discipline but as a mode of epistemic refusal, one that values situated knowledge and challenges the legitimizing narratives of mainstream criminology. This is, of course, shaped by my own positionality, but it resonates with other efforts to move beyond narrow, legalistic framings of incarceration and toward broader critiques of power. Incarceration studies, as I use the term, are not about creating a new discipline, but about cultivating a critical space for reflection and resistance – one that draws from multiple intellectual and political traditions without being bound by disciplinary norms. Indeed, many scholars have argued that the concept of “decolonial criminology” may be an oxymoron (Crichlow, 2023). Others have advocated for a queer decolonial criminology (Ball, 2019), a southern decolonial criminology (Dimou, 2021), or even called for the abolition of criminology altogether (Saleh-Hanna, 2023). Still, others argue for putting abolition at the center, not just as a topic but as a method and form of praxis (Lamble, 2021). Alongside these interventions, Pali (2022) has called for a criminology of dis/obedience, emphasizing how criminology’s neglect of the persistent criminalisation of activism and dissent sustains cultures of obedience and complicity with state power. These interventions show that resisting the carceral state also means rethinking how knowledge about crime and punishment is produced, shared, and legitimized.

Neutrality and the Politics of Knowledge

One of the leading organizing institutions in the field of criminology in Europe, the ESC, defines criminology as a form of knowledge pertaining to: “the explanation, prevention, control, and treatment of crime and delinquency, offenders and victims, including the measurement and detection of crime, legislation and the practice of criminal law, and law enforcement, judicial, and correctional systems” (n.d., Section 2). This description presents crime and punishment through the analogy of action-reaction by omitting larger structural understandings of oppression. Similar framings characterize other mainstream criminological institutions. For example, the American Society of Criminology (ASC) describes itself primarily as a professional and scientific society devoted to the pursuit of scholarly knowledge (n.d.). This posture does not explicitly acknowledge the racialized and political conditions of punishment. At the same time, critical traditions have developed within and beyond these institutions. In the U.S., abolitionist and feminist approaches to prison studies have long exposed the political and racialized dimensions of incarceration, particularly its entanglement with the afterlives of slavery and anti-Black state violence (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; Alexander, 2010). The Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice (DCCSJ) of the ASC, for example, has taken unequivocal positions, including a recent statement opposing the genocide in Palestine and connecting abolitionist struggles against the prison industrial complex to broader struggles against colonialism and racial domination (2024). In South Africa, carceral institutions remain central to the post-apartheid state’s governance, reproducing racial and class hierarchies under the language of constitutionalism (Gillespie, 2022). Australian critical criminology has developed in close dialogue with critiques of settler colonialism and the disproportionate criminalization of Indigenous peoples, making colonial power a central object of analysis (Hogg et al., 2017). Similarly, in the Global South, where carceral institutions are often experienced as direct legacies of colonial rule or neoliberal restructuring, critique is more likely to be embedded in social movements and grounded in histories of collective struggle.

In contrast, knowledge production around incarceration in Europe tends to be more cautious, reformist, and aligned with the ideal of “humane” punishment. Yet there are important exceptions, most notably the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control (EGSD&SC), which has long resisted these tendencies and foregrounded the political dimensions of punishment. At the same time, it is true that in comparison to the U.S., some European prisons, especially in Northern Europe, are often, or at least appear to be, more “caring.” For example, the European Court of Human Rights abolished life without parole in its Vinter decision (2013), and the Council of Europe has developed detailed guidelines on the humane treatment of prisoners (Snacken, 2010). These legal and institutional checks have helped shape the narrative of European imprisonment as more enlightened or rehabilitative, thereby displacing the need for radical critique. But this ideal of “better” prisons can function as a way to manage discomfort with state violence rather than confront it. The result is a body of scholarship that often reinforces the legitimacy of carceral institutions under the guise of progressive reform.

In this line of thought, mainstream conversations in Europe often revolve around comparisons of successful penological models and neglect the political dimensions of incarceration. Within this framework, Scandinavian prisons are frequently idealized as more “humane” (Smith, 2012). Such accounts resonate with broader European penological trends, where human rights discourses are mobilized to present imprisonment as a more dignified and regulated practice (Snacken, 2010; Daems and Robert, 2017). Whether expressed in the optimistic expectation that prisons will eventually disappear (Tonry, 2022) or in the comparative celebration of European and Scandinavian humanism, these standpoints remain silent on Gaza as an “open-air prison,” even though it epitomizes the entanglement of carcerality, colonialism, and genocide. This silence is not incidental but reflects a deeper epistemic binary in Western criminology.

For Lévi-Strauss, societies either absorb dangerous forces through incorporation (anthropophagy) or reject them through banishment (anthropemy) (Foucault, 2015:2). Foucault questioned this neat opposition, showing that assimilation and exclusion work together as techniques of power rather than as distinct alternatives. Drawing on Foucault’s critique of Lévi-Strauss in The Punitive Society (2015), this binary between exclusion and assimilation, with assimilation being considered to be inherently superior, obscures the fact that both “humane” and “barbaric” prison systems operate within the same carceral logic. They both use normalization and coercion, either under the cover of social integration or, in the case of genocide, toward extinction. This insight also clarifies why discourses of inclusivity in neoliberal societies, whether in Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, or progressive regimes like California, fail to challenge domination: they promise recognition and integration but function as disciplinary mechanisms that neutralize difference. In California, for example, reforms celebrated as progressive coexist with the largest prison system in the United States (Gilmore, 2007; Simon, 2014), showing that inclusivity rhetoric operates alongside, rather than against, mass incarceration. Both assimilation and exclusion can thus be read as disciplinary machines: one excludes, the other incorporates in order to neutralize (Foucault, 2015).

Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics provides a framework to understand how sovereign power governs through the capacity to decide who may live and who must die, linking carcerality and genocide as systems of control over marginalized populations (2019). This dimension extends beyond what mainstream criminological thinking can capture when crime is approached in a depoliticized way. Carceral spaces, such as prisons and detention camps, function as “death worlds,” where life is systematically devalued or destroyed, aligning with genocidal aims. Resistance under such conditions often takes the form of self-inflicted violence (Fanon, 1963; Vasiliou, 2025).

Episode One: Silence in Bucharest

In September 2024, the ESC held its annual conference in Bucharest, Romania. During the opening ceremony, the University of Jerusalem was mentioned without acknowledgment of its relationship with the state of Israel. Over the following days, academics from five Israeli universities (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Open University of Israel, Bar-Ilan University, University of Haifa, and Ariel University) presented research on topics such as sexual justice, white-collar crime, forgiveness therapy, gender bias, happiness and self-labelling, substance abuse, and innovative incarceration models. After the conference, a group of participants co-authored a “Letter from Concerned Criminologists regarding the Representation of Israeli Academic Institutions at the ESC, Bucharest (11/9–14/9)” (2024). In response to the concerns raised, the Executive Board of the ESC issued an official statement on November 8, 2024, affirming that the ESC “does not support the institutional boycott of academic establishments based on their country of operation,” while emphasizing the Society’s commitment to “academic freedom, mutual respect, and the pursuit of criminological knowledge” (2024). It further clarified that, aside from the declaration on Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, a conflict occurring within a Council of Europe member state, the ESC will “refrain from issuing statements on international conflicts outside Europe.”

This response reflects a broader problem within mainstream European criminology: that of selective engagement with geopolitical violence. The ESC’s willingness to comment on Ukraine but not on the Israeli settler genocide in Gaza illustrates an institutional double standard, where “neutrality” is invoked to shield certain forms of state violence (and certain states) from critique. Didier Fassin, a French anthropologist who has written widely on prisons, policing, and the carceral state, describes in Moral Abdication (2025) the response of Western governments, institutions, and academics to the destruction of Gaza as a failure, not only of action but of thought. Fassin demonstrates how words like “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” have been avoided, amounting to a kind of silence that is shaped by political power. His analysis connects with historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt’s idea that refusing to think critically can make people complicit in violence (1963). In the context of criminology, where neutrality and objectivity are often seen as academic virtues, Fassin’s critique reminds us that staying silent or using neutral language can help maintain systems of oppression. This dynamic is also evident in the restorative justice movement, which has often remained silent on state and colonial violence. As Pali (2018) notes, its entanglement with counterterrorism agendas risks reinforcing, rather than challenging, state power. This point raises an important question: what does it mean to speak about justice if we cannot name violence?

I treat this not as an accidental omission but as the effect of disciplinary formations that determine what can, and cannot, be said. What looks like “neutrality” is not an absence of politics but a historically sedimented disciplinary norm. Can a discipline publicly take a position on Palestine if its archive does not enable naming state violence as an object of legitimate knowledge? Do disciplines closely aligned with state institutions inevitably reproduce silence, while those shaped by traditions of critique can foreground resistance? And can collective acts of epistemic disobedience force an epistemic break where continuity has long been defended? 

In criminology, so-called “neutrality” is bound up with its professional ties to states, courts, and prisons – institutions invested in maintaining their legitimacy. This alignment is reinforced by funding structures and collaborative research projects: for instance, those conducted with or for police and prison agencies absorb criminological knowledge into state agendas and reward research that sustains rather than challenges institutional authority. To break the posture of neutrality would be to undermine criminology’s own conditions of existence. By contrast, feminist, abolitionist, and decolonial frameworks are not structurally tied to the state in the same way; their legitimacy often comes from critique and epistemic disobedience. Thus, taking a position on Palestine is not a violation of their disciplinary rules but a fulfillment of them. On this basis, one can argue that criminology presents itself as objective and neutral, yet its rules of knowledge production restrict how crime and punishment are understood, privileging positivistic explanations of individual behavior over structural violence. In this way, it produces silences around colonialism, racial domination, and even genocide, reproducing continuities of state power. By contrast, fields such as feminist and gender studies, ethnic studies, anthropology, critical carceral studies, and decolonial approaches open up discontinuities. They challenge the supposed neutrality of disciplinary rules, foreground relations of power, and create space for epistemic disobedience. Different areas of knowledge, disciplinary traditions, and geographical locations can engage with this tentative thesis differently. For example, the European Science Education Research Association (ESERA, 2025), and the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC, 2025) recently condemned the “war crimes” in Gaza, making clear that in times of “humanitarian crisis,” neutrality amounts to complicity. As ESERA is also an organization bound by rules of neutrality and objectivity, the comments from readers and members published below the announcement focused on the idea that the organization should not take official positions on politics. In line with a different disciplinary tradition, the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA, 2023) and the International Sociological Association (ISA, 2024) have issued strong public statements denouncing the violence, with the ISA even suspending ties with the Israeli Sociological Society. However, these distinctions are always mediated by institutional and geopolitical context, as well as by the personal circumstances of those in positions of influence within associations. The Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, for instance, terminated the contract of anthropologist Ghassan Hage in February 2024 after he expressed support for Palestine and the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement (Scholars at Risk, 2024).

Additionally, if the production of academic knowledge is perceived as purely an expression of academic freedom, inherently divorced from state politics and, thus, beyond critique, then we miss all the cases where this has been debunked. In The Cunning of Gender Violence (Abu-Lughod et al., 2023), the authors demonstrate through various case studies how gender violence, defined in narrow, individualized terms, is detached from systems of state and colonial power. Thus, global agendas in combating gender violence result in reinforcing civilizational hierarchies. In contexts like Palestine, the assumed suffering of women is used to justify humanitarian or military intervention, while erasing the broader structures of apartheid, occupation, and settler colonialism. As Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2017:1279) demonstrates in her analysis of the “occupation of the senses” in East Jerusalem, settler colonialism is not only territorial but also embodied and sensory, producing violence that invades everyday life and inscribes itself on Palestinian bodies. In Gaza, international concern about gender violence has often co-existed with silence around reproductive violence, forced displacement, and targeted attacks on hospitals by Israel. These liberal framings of justice as procedure and gender violence as pathology serve to uphold the authority of the state rather than challenge its role in producing harm. The extent to which academic knowledge production ignores these realities is a case of complicity with the state that perpetuates violence, and a state that may, in fact, present itself as a benevolent benefactor championing the rights of women. The most blatant example is the state’s use of LGBTQ rights to conceal its violence. Israel’s employment of pinkwashing strategies serves to portray it as liberal and gay-friendly rather than as an oppressive colonizer (Shafie, 2015).

Likewise, in the case of criminology as an academic institution, calls for “justice” that ignore histories of racial, colonial, and carceral violence risk becoming tools of epistemic containment. This means that academic neutrality or the inability to call out academic institutions can become a tool for epistemic complicity. As Mignolo (2009) argues, epistemic disobedience requires delinking from hegemonic modes of knowing that present themselves as apolitical. Academic freedom must include the freedom to critique, resist, and refuse participation in systems that perpetuate human suffering under the guise of scholarly neutrality. The ESC’s position maintains a veneer of impartiality, albeit a conflicted one, but in doing so, it evades the structural power dynamics that underpin knowledge production and the global politics of representation.

Prison Yoga and Restorative Justice for Israeli Prisoners

A similar whitewashing of state violence occurs through the promotion of prison wellness programs and mechanisms that appear to cause less harm. In the state of Israel, this discourse has shaped rehabilitation programs that emphasize wellness, such as prison yoga and mindfulness (Kovalsky et al., 2020), as well as restorative justice initiatives that prioritize accountability and healing (Peleg-Koriat and Weimann-Saks, 2019). Health-oriented prison initiatives are presented as producing tangible benefits in physical and mental well-being (Tesler et al., 2023). In practice, these programs are implemented primarily in prisons for Israeli citizens. This selective application highlights how the apartheid system functions: while prisons for Israeli citizens are framed as sites of “care” and “rehabilitation,” Palestinian prisoners continue to face systemic torture, medical neglect, and sexual abuse, both historically and in the present (Addameer, n.d.). The fact that such claims circulate in academic publications further reveals a broader failure: peer reviewers, journal editors, and scholarly associations often fail to hold this research accountable, allowing prison scholarship to reproduce state propaganda under the guise of neutral science. Pointing out that these programs exist only for Israeli citizens, while Palestinians face torture and neglect, is already a form of epistemic disobedience because it challenges the silences in scholarship that conferences and peer review often protect.

The rationality behind restorative and health-centered programs becomes a pillar through which genocide is justified, projecting a humane face to the occupation in international academic and policy arenas. While these programs present a façade of compassion, they operate within a regime where basic needs such as medical care, food access, and mobility are systematically denied Palestinian prisoners, rendering health not as a right but a biopolitical tool of control: determining who eats and who dies from starvation. In this context, wellness discourse coexists with structural starvation and medical neglect, enabling a slow form of violence that mirrors genocidal actions. The production of this type of academic knowledge and the inclusion of these “findings” in criminology conferences reveals a dissociation within the production of knowledge: on the one hand, the condemnation of violence against prisoners, and on the other hand, a political silence and implicit approval of state violence. This reflects a broader epistemic alignment that allows academic societies like the ESC to remain neutral in the face of genocide.

Episode Two: Epistemic Disobedience in Practice

I am writing these lines a few days after the 2025 ESC Conference, which took place in Athens between 3 and 6 September 2025. Criminologists for Palestine (CfP), a collective of ESC members opposing Israel’s genocide, put forward a motion at the General Assembly calling for the Society to cut ties with Israeli institutions complicit in these crimes, most notably Ariel University, built in an illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (2025). The collective also organized daily activities throughout the conference. Although the motion received overwhelming support in the General Assembly, the ESC Board refused to allow a vote, thereby maintaining the Society’s complicity in Israel’s atrocity crimes (ibid.). The genocide in Palestine, then, appeared at the conference not only as a geopolitical conflict but also as the possibility of naming an epistemic break, a moment that forces academic disciplines to either confront their complicity or remain silent. The emergence of Criminologists for Palestine exemplifies this pressure. Their organizing compelled the ESC to decide whether to continue shielding itself with neutrality or to confront its entanglement with state violence. In this sense, the collective embodies epistemic disobedience in practice, creating the possibility of rupture within a field otherwise structured by reformist neutrality. A few questions remain: Can an academic association, and the discipline it represents, absorb an epistemic break by choosing to remain silent on Palestine? And can collective acts of refusal, such as Criminologists for Palestine’s, force rupture where continuity has long been defended?

Conclusion

This article has shown how mainstream European criminology often treats incarceration as a technical problem to be managed, not a political project rooted in colonialism, racial domination, and genocidal practice. When read through the lens of Foucault, this silence is not accidental: disciplinary rules shape what can be said and studied. Mbembe (2019) reminds us that carceral regimes decide who may live and who must die; Mignolo (2009) urges us to break with “neutral” ways of knowing and being that hide this fact. By privileging questions of institutional efficiency, Europeanization of prisons, individual adaptation, and psychological well-being, this form of knowledge production obscures the structural violence of incarceration and legitimizes state power. To resist the soft violence of “humane” prisons and wellness discourses that sanitize state brutality, we must delink from modes of knowing that treat incarceration as apolitical and see imprisonment as the outcome of an individual moral failure. Epistemic disobedience means challenging what counts as legitimate knowledge within criminological frameworks. It demands that we refuse participation in carceral narratives that make genocide appear manageable, reformable, or irrelevant. In this sense, epistemic disobedience requires recognizing and amplifying discontinuities where they already exist, within associations, conferences, journals, and classrooms, and creating new ones where neutrality has become the rule. This is not a romanticization of resistance. Practices of epistemic disobedience must account for the different positions from which people speak, both within academia and at its margins, including those whose precarious status, such as dependence on visas or insecure contracts, shapes the risks they can take. Epistemic disobedience, therefore, must be understood as both critique and practice that insists on intellectual and political accountability – a way of breaking silences and imagining knowledge otherwise.