Asian Criminology—the Role and Approach in Its Dialog with Global North

Abstract: Breaking the inequality of knowledge production by the Global North is a major challenge for global criminological development. While criminological thoughts from the Global North have contributed significantly to the discipline’s emergence and evolution, they have also seriously overlooked the limitations of theories rooted in the context of the North; the literature dominated by the North also overlooked its methodological weakness in its ability to reveal the reality of crime and criminal justice phenomena in the Global South. As a representative force for decolonizing and developing global criminology, Asian criminology emphasizes a strategy that formulates dialogue with the North in its paradigm. It promotes a “context-focused approach” as its main methodological approach. This presentation reviews the development of Asian criminology’s strategies for theoretical construction, institutional building, and methodological approaches. Asian Criminology promotes a pluralistic and interdisciplinary methodological approach that integrates quantitative, qualitative, and multiple methods, including currently developing computational criminology, further proposing cutting-edge knowledge production in global criminology.