Pablo Ciocchini

• Researcher at National Scientific and Technical Research Council

This article develops both a critique of the Southern criminology project but also argues that a continued focus on the global organization of the economy should sit central in anti‐imperialist social science. Southern criminology, reflective of other trends in ‘decolonization’, has not placed a sustained critique of domination and exploitation cen...

Populations around the Global South have long suffered gross violations of human rights. This type of violence has been traditionally neglected by mainstream criminology. This chapter questions the potential of dominant human rights practice for researching violence and criminality in the Global South. Whilst there is an appeal to universal freedom...

The articles presented in this special issue explore the relationship between politics and law in the context of the Global South. While some of the contributions examined this relationship through the symbolic power of the law, others focused on how violence is embedded into the relationship between law and politics. The first group, which focused...

The “war on drugs” in the Philippines has claimed thousands of people lives and has resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of drug users. Legal professionals working in criminal courts have adopted a “punitive paternalism” when dealing with these cases that presented plea bargaining, even in cases based on planted evidence, as helping d...

The intertwined relationship between ‘development’, ‘law’, and the ‘international’ is rooted deeply in the formation of the contemporary world. Since the end of the Second World War, ‘international law’ and ‘international development’ have become two of the most prominent secular languages through which competing aspirations about a better world ar...

The “War on Drugs” in the Philippines resulted in the arrest of unprecedented number of suspects of drug-related crimes. Legal professionals managed this deluge of cases by embracing the device of plea bargaining, previously banned from those types of cases. Given the weakness of the legal cases of drug-related offences assembled by the police, con...

Corporations’ profit-making objectives are a central force guiding development strategies in the Global South but contradictorily can be blamed for a range of social and environmental harms. This article brings a state-corporate crime lens to bear on the economic and political processes that shape Global South-located commodity production. It seeks...

The criminal process in the Province of Buenos Aires has been affected by radical reforms in the last decades. Beginning with the complete replacement of the criminal procedure code in 1998 to the introduction of pre-trial hearings and simplified procedures for cases declared in flagrante delicto in 2004 the reforms have impacted more than legal pr...

This chapter examines the political thought of Antonio Gramsci as it relates to socio-legal analyses of law. It focuses on the potential role of litigation in a larger revolutionary strategy. The chapter reflects upon the relevance of Gramsci’s political strategy to legal struggles today. It argues that Gramsci’s analysis of the integral state (i.e...

The “War on Drugs” in the Philippines, unleashed by President Duterte in 2016, has put pressure on legal professionals to respond to the drug problem more efficiently. The police’s drive to arrest an unprecedented number of suspects of drug-related crimes has translated to a massive influx of cases into the justice system. Prosecutors, public attor...

Recent appeals to decolonize criminology argue for a radical reorientation of the subject towards Global South relevant research agendas, theories and scholars. This paper begins by problematizing the current theoretical tendencies in Southern criminology’s view of coloniality and the vision for decolonization. First, Southern criminology has not d...

El rol de jueces y fiscales como garantes del estado de derecho es fundamental en el actual contexto de creciente populismo penal. Su rol es aún más significativo en las sociedades del Sur Global en dónde la corrupción y el abuso policial vuelven al populismo penal aún más peligroso que en el Norte Global. En este contexto, la supervisión sobre las...

Recientemente hubo una serie de reclamos sobre la necesidad de descolonizar la criminología. Estas demandas afirman que las voces del Sur global deben incluirse en los debates y estudios académicos, y que hacerlo llevará a una democratización radical de la materia. Este artículo comienza problematizando algunas de las afirmaciones hechas en esta lí...

Este dossier es el resultado de los trabajos presentados en el encuentro “Los actores judiciales latinoamericanos y sus prácticas” que fuera organizado por la Erika Bárcena Arévalo y Pablo Ciocchini en la sede del Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) en la Ciudad de México en junio de 2017. En dicha oportunidad se presentaron trabaj...

En las últimas décadas se ha presenciado globalmente el surgimiento de un populismo penal de la mano del miedo al delito. Este fenómeno ha adquirido características especiales en los países del Sur Global, en dónde la sensación de inseguridad se ha agravado por la ineficacia de las agencias estatales encargadas de lidiar con el delito. La corrupció...

This paper scrutinises the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which allows foreign investors to sue host governments for any regulations that might directly or indirectly affect private investments. It gives investors rights over host-states – and local populations – in international arbitration tribunals. The focus of this article...

Over the last three decades, governments in Latin America and Southeast Asia have transitioned from authoritarian to democratic regimes. A series of reforms to criminal procedures have been promoted to improve transparency and accountability and reduce the chronic backlog suffered by courts in the region. These reforms are based on the "ideal" mode...

This paper applies a Gramscian analytical framework to scrutinise the judicial decision-making process. Based on two distinct research projects, the article explores how, on one hand judges in criminal courts can be identified as part of the bureaucratic machinery of the state, as ‘technicians of repression’; whereas, on the other hand, human right...

The literature on comparative law has a long and robust tradition, but studies comparing courts and judicial systems are scarce. Comparative studies in the Global South, following Shapiro’s institutional approach, have aimed to measure the involvement of courts in politics by assessing the power of the judiciary in society, the level of judicial in...

Since the late 1980s, following the transition to democratic rule in Latin America, criminal courts all over the continent have been going through a process of continuous reform. Reformers introduced an adversarial-based procedural system, arguing that it would guarantee due process and greater transparency and accountability. However, in recent ye...

Este trabajo describe y analiza la relevancia de los cambios sufridos por la administración de justicia penal bonaerense en los últimos años. Particularmente, se focaliza en el uso de la demora judicial como movilizador de los cambios organizacionales. Se sostiene que a pesar de las resistencias sufridas, estos cambios han sido verdaderamente profu...

Presentación del dossier ‘Estudios actuales sobre la justicia penal’

Since the transition to democracy court delay has been a powerful signifier of the problem of the criminal justice in Argentina. This has been the case particularly in the Province of Buenos Aires where court delay was constantly projected by the Provincial Government’s narrative as evidence of injustice and/or inefficiency in the system. It has be...

La demora judicial ha motivado sucesivas reformas en la administración de justicia penal bonaerense. Estas reformas han tenido como efecto el adelantamiento del momento resolutivo del proceso penal a la etapa de garantías. Esta tendencia se ha acentuado con la introducción audiencias orales tempranas en el año 2005. Este artículo análiza en detalle...

Los discursos de reforma judicial y los programas que han promovido en América Latina han asociado al expediente judicial en el proceso penal con las prácticas del sistema inquisitorial. La persistencia del expediente a pesar de las numerosas reformas que han buscado erradicarlo se ha explicado por la resistencia de los actores judiciales a abandon...

Desde la transición a la democracia el discurso político ha identificado la demora judicial como la evidencia de la injusticia e ineficiencia de la justicia penal en la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Estos discursos sobre la demora judicial han permitido que se lleven a cabo una serie de reformas en el sistema de justicia penal, la cuales han reestruct...

In their fight against terrorism, modern states seem to install a permanent state of exception. This chapter focuses on the role that notions connected to the Rule of Law play in key speeches delivered by two political leaders who had to defend exceptional measures in reaction to terrorist actions and threats: the former British Prime Minister Tony...

This chapter examines Agamben’s concept of the ‘state of exception’ in the context of the Basque conflict within a historical and contemporary context. In particular, it will use Agamben’s framework to explore the counter-argument made by the Spanish government that its ‘war on terror’ (in contrast with those of the US and UK) is lawful. The chapte...

Prison emerged in its early forms in Europe in the mid 16th century and it spread together with capitalism. It operates by imposing to the individual a particular rigid time regime in an extremely limited spatial environment. Although society has been speeding itself up during the last forty years due to the introduction of new information and tran...