The Global Crime and Justice Hub (formerly the Global Criminal Justice Hub) was established in 2016 as a means to strengthen the Centre for Criminology’s international links, and a vehicle for staff and student exchange. The Hub develops globally oriented, critical perspectives on criminological knowledge production through international collaboration. The Hub encourages research and thinking outside of the Global North and West, where traditional centres of knowledge production are concentrated, through institutional cooperations and networks. It seeks to include historically marginalised areas of study, voices, and epistemologies in theoretical and empirical debates. Hub activities are varied and take place across geographical locations, and online. Activities are diverse in formats and mediums, welcoming film, photography, visual art, and music.

The Global Crime and 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. In recent 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 Crime and 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 five iterations held remotely (2021), in Oxford (2022), Mumbai (2023), Sante Fe (2024), and Cape Town (2025). The Hub co-organizes and part funds the annual conference which attracts a large number of scholars from across the world. In 2026 the Hub is ushering a new partnership with The Centre for Advanced Studies “Reflexive Globalisation and the Law: Colonial Legacies and their Implications in the 21st Century" (RefLex) at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Faculty of Law. The Global Crime and  Justice Hub also operates an academic visitor scheme under which we have attracted scholars to the Centre from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kashmir, and Argentina.  Having laid these foundations, our ambition 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 Crime and 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.

Contact

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.