The Role of Courts in the Global South in Criminal Justice Matters

This paper applies a Gramscian analytical framework to the analysis of the role of courts in the Global South dealing with criminal matters under neoliberalism. Despite the moral and political leadership that courts have gained under what has been called ‘the judicialization of politics’, judges dealing with criminal matters have loss that leadership in detriment of other agencies of the criminal justice system, particularly law enforcement agencies. In this way, judges can increasingly become identified as part of the bureaucratic machinery of the state, as ‘technicians of repression’. The paper argues this loss of leadership can be understood as a result of ‘politicisation of crime’, partially a consequence of the raising crime rate in societies of the Global South, that have paved the way to the emergence of a popular punitivism on one side, and a managerialism on the other. The paper analyses how the specific conditions of peripheral and semi peripheral societies amplify the most negative aspects of these two phenomena. Considering these differences, the paper argues that there is a need for comparative studies that provide a better understanding on how criminal courts operate and the role they play in societies in the Global South. This paper explores the potential for that comparative studies by looking into two case studies: Argentina and Philippines.