Permanent Suspicion: Reframing Criminal Law Through Postcolonial Thought

Name: Permanent Suspicion: Reframing Criminal Law Through Postcolonial Thought
Start: 2025-06-24
End: 2025-06-24
Location: Centre for Criminology Seminar Room

Speaker(s):

Kalika Mehta is a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work examines (international) criminal law and human rights through the lens of critical legal theory. She is the author of Strategic Litigation and Corporate Complicity in Crimes under International Law: A TWAIL Analysis (Routledge, 2024).

Associated with:

Centre for Criminology Southernising Criminology

About the event

Event date:

24 June 2025

Event time:

17:15 - 18:30

Oxford week:

TT 9

Audience:

Anyone

Venue:

Centre for Criminology Seminar Room

Registration:

Registration form

Organised by:

Southernising Criminology Discussion Group

Who to contact:

María Jesús Valenzuela Suárez

Add to calendar

This presentation invites legal scholars and law students to re-examine the foundations of criminal law through the lens of postcolonial theory. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, the presentation will explore how criminal law has operated as a colonial tool by constructing racialised subjects, legitimising coercion and embedding patterns of inequality that persist today. From vagrancy laws in colonial India to modern ‘crimmigration’ regimes in the 'Global North', it traces how techniques of control developed in the colonies have been repurposed within Western legal systems. It invites participants to ask: What if the law itself, not just the accused, is placed under permanent suspicion?