The Global Criminal Justice Hub has had collaborations with the University of Leuven (Belgium), the University of Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), the University of Monash (Australia), the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance & Society, Leiden Law School (The Netherlands) and the University of Hong Kong amongst others. Over the last three years, the Centre for Criminology has sought to focus the Hub on a smaller number of institutions with whom we seek to adopt closer collaborative relations. To this end, the Centre has signed memoranda of understanding with the Criminology group at Melbourne University, the Criminology Department at the Tata Institute for the Social Sciences in Mumbai, and the University del Litoral in Sante Fe, Argentina. The Global Criminal Justice Hub also operates an academic visitor scheme under which we have attracted scholars to the Centre from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kashmir, and Argentina.
The principal mechanism for developing the Hub in this way has been the annual ‘Punishment in Global Peripheries’ conference. This has now had four iterations held remotely (2021), in Oxford (2022), Mumbai (2023) and Sante Fe (2024). The Centre has co-organized and part funded the last three conferences which have attracted a large number of scholars from across the world. We are currently organizing a fifth iteration of the conference which the Centre is part-funding and co-organizing with the Criminology Department at the University of Cape Town, to be held in December 2025 in Cape Town. Having laid these foundations, our ambition for the next three years is to develop the Hub into an active network on bilateral and multi-lateral collaborations. We hope this entails increased opportunities for student and staff exchange, as well as developing proposals for joint research projects across the Hub.
The Global Criminal Justice Hub also supports the Southernising Criminology discussion group which is a student-led initiative that aims to extend criminological horizons outside the Global North, reflecting on distinct patterns and trends of crime, justice and punishment in jurisdictions historically situated at the periphery of knowledge production and theory formation. The group provides key tools and frameworks to recenter the epistemological and methodological focus of the discipline, aiming to tackle unequal geopolitical and academic relations of power and representation. Southernising Criminology organizes a termly seminar series which brings practitioners and academics across different disciplines to Oxford to present on their research and exchange knowledge on practice. The group also organizes distinct thematic series such as the ‘Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Alternative Justice Mechanisms’ series and ‘The Political Economy of Global Criminal Justice’ series, alongside its regular scheduling, and started a collaboration series with the Police and Policing Research Discussion Group.
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Please contact Leila Ullrich if you would like any further information, or if you would like to contribute to supporting these initiatives. We are particularly interested in fundraising for students from the global South to enable them to attend Oxford, either on our taught MSc course, or as research students on our DPhil programme.