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This chapter provides a context for The Emerald International Handbook of Activist Criminology. It offers an overview of the small, yet burgeoning literature dedicated to ‘criminology activism’, which includes engagement with public criminology and various brands of critical criminology, as well as zemiology or the study of social harm beyond narrow state-centric definitions of crime. Among other things, the chapter considers the role academics might play in addressing social and criminal injustice, and the new opportunities afforded to both academics and activists – including citizen journalists and media professionals – by digital technologies and social media when intervening in campaigns for justice and formal criminal legal processes. To answer the question, why now, the chapter argues we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented period of upheaval requiring action from activists and academics alike, including criminologists engaged in social scientific research operating beyond the delusions of objectivity and value-neutrality, that is, politically engaged research aiming to remedy not only the absence of meaningful state intervention in crime and harm but also expose the role of corporations and the state itself in prosecuting and perpetuating crime and harm.

This chapter explores the empowering potential of research conducted with an activist orientation. It focuses on the story of four migrant workers employed in a Norwegian fish-processing plant, who, supported by the local trade union and along with 67 colleagues, resisted against exploitative working, employment, and living conditions. Meant as a study of the emergence and dynamics of criminological activism, this chapter reflects the capacities in which researchers tend to act to challenge the normalisation of state-corporate harms and to empower those victimised by these harms, as well as on the pitfalls of these approaches. In so doing, this chapter points to the parallels between state-corporate criminology, labour perspective on human trafficking, social harm, and zemiology. Ultimately, it calls for heightened reflexivity and critical intellectual distance from activist researchers.

Activist criminology advocates for social change by acting beyond the role of the academic, mainly through first-hand involvement in the field (Goyes, 2016). In this chapter, the author offers a longitudinal reflection on the researcher’s positionality, epistemology and methodology from the personal experience since their first research project, in 2019. During this project, the author started having cooperation with the Liberi Nantes migrants’ sports centre, now a community centre in Rome’s working-class suburb. This sparked her first reflections on activist criminology and how to embed it in her research approach and practice. The initial cooperation evolved in the ongoing and evolving collective ‘conversational integration’ project, which aims at overcoming the notion of integration as one-sided assimilation, working on addressing the diverse needs of the local community through a bottom-up governance initiative. This chapter is to be intended as a checkpoint in their growth within activist criminology and it hopefully serves to spark questions, suggestions and a push to form a solid network of activist academics that can help in fostering social change outside of the neoliberal agendas of academia.

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom.

Inquiries, commissions, reviews and the promise of broader data collection about racial and gender disparities are now the reflex defensive responses from state institutions charged with grievous social harm, particularly in the UK. Recommendations from these exercises are rarely implemented. As criminologists, our ability to produce and analyse data that evidences or better illuminates social harm has long been a key offer of the discipline to activism.

How are we to respond to the very institutions activist criminologists seek to challenge immediately offering this very activity, invariably protracted and ineffectual, as a reflex response to activist challenge? This chapter explores this tension. Grounded in the work of groups struggling to end police stop and search, it considers the strategy impasse around research and data production that faces grassroots activists and their accomplice researchers. The chapter proposes new routes for collaboration and action across activist and criminologist communities that may help move past the ‘data trap’. In short, it seeks to answer: do activists need more evidence?

The illegalisation of solidarities towards migrants with irregular status provides critical insights into the limits that EU governments set to the free movement, speech, and action of their citizens and their consequences. Here, the author outlines why and how, in a scenario of illegalisation, solidarities must come to terms with inherent contradictions, because the very nature of these solidarities, in terms of who can perform them, may reproduce specific dynamics of structural inequalities. Particularly questioning who rescues, and who can rescue, and who cannot, implies the acknowledgement that solidarities, and visible resistance, are not always democratic, but instruments of the privileged that reproduce social stratification. By critically engaging in the development of activist criminology, the author argues that the democratisation of solidarities would entail that all individuals have the same possibilities and incur the same risks if confronted with a scenario of illegalisation. But such democratisation is a chimera, meaning that there are social hierarchies of who is allowed to rescue, and who would have too much to lose. This also suggests relevant implications for criminologists who choose not to divorce from a commitment to solidarity activism. In fact, activist criminologists often work ‘at a distance’, dispose of continued access to valuable resources and networks, and make a career based on their activist work. These elements of privilege inevitably provide them with disproportionate power in activist spaces, whose critical acknowledgement is paramount and must be complemented with radical action to progressively work towards a deconstruction of their own incongruencies.

Criminologists spend many hours debating whether they should intervene in the real world to make it better or whether they should limit themselves to taking a detached stance in their research. Debates about the role of criminologists in society have followed the script of the modern academy, which praises the lone hero researcher. Yet, the challenges criminologists confront with their activism have deep cultural and structural roots that only collective action can transform. The injustices criminologists confront (defined as harm or crime committed by individual or collective actors that is corporate-sponsored or state-sponsored) require that criminologists exchange the ‘I’ for a ‘we’, and ask how we can collectively mobilise to transform society. In this chapter, the author discusses how Colombian Indigenous communities and the author, in partnership, have used a pedagogy of liberation to transform the deep sources of violence fuelling their genocide.

Social movements are sites of knowledge production. Green criminologists are interested in activism both as an informal response to environmental harms/crimes and in their explorations of the possibility of activist green criminology. In this chapter, the author calls attention to a related issue – the significance of knowledge produced in social movements. Drawing on her study of the resistance movements against hydropower in Turkey, the author discusses how movement knowledge can contribute to green criminology in relation to the (i) complexity of harm and victimisation; (ii) politics of knowledge in identifying harm; and (iii) limits of formal processes in preventing harm. The author concludes by highlighting the importance of recognising activists as subjects who produce knowledge, in academic engagement with activism.

Social movements, justice campaigns and civil activism have gained recent scholarly attention among non-Western democracies since the end of the Cold War. Yet the meaning and practical implications of civil activism remain contested especially in contexts linked to militarised democracy and the criminalisation of civil activism. Importantly, the broader political terrain within which militarised democracy is situated is increasingly changing, bringing new challenges to its understanding. This chapter builds on liberal democratic theory and discusses militarised democracy in Nigeria to critique state-centric notion of criminology. It draws on two case examples, namely the proscription of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) in 2017 by the federal government against its organised protests for self-determination and the state repressive response to the nation-wide protest against police brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) known as the #End SARS protest in 2020. Both provide on-the-ground evidence of the criminalisation of civil activism. In the alternative, this chapter reflects on how transforming democracy can redress state repression and offer a better understanding of civil activism, which can strengthen developing democracies, including addressing questions of political marginalisation, distributive justice, police brutality, inequality, repressive state response and unequal state structure accounting for organised protests.