In the past year, Sweden has introduced a new set of hard borders and harsh punishments in response to gangland shootings, the recruitment of ‘child soldiers’, increased insecurity, declining trust, rising inequality, and the perceived failings of a generation of immigrants to integrate into society. More prisons, more police, more punishments, and more politics. We have been here before. With over thirty years of social science research on the causes of crime, the efficacy of incarceration, and the social costs of mass imprisonment, as criminologists at once removed from the mechanics of policy making, we are all too familiar with the causes and consequences of such pursuits. Watching this turn in Sweden is like watching a train go off the rails in slow motion without being able to hit the switch or warn those in harm’s way. It is like a Greek tragedy, complete with its doomed heroes, its pain and suffering, but without its catharsis or compassion. Young people, particularly those who are racialized, who are or their parents are immigrants, are increasingly subjected to victimization and criminalization; they are experiencing higher levels of violence for which they are blamed and punished. As criminal justice comes for them, they are literally removed from society’s shared future, how we imagine it, how we will live it.

What is going on Sweden provides a compelling case to rethink the role of academics who study crime and punishment, particularly in a social world that seems to be unraveling. The stakes are high. What once was self-evident-- a society based on equality, mutual respect, interdependence--has become destabilized and fractured. Here and elsewhere, we face a collective challenge to work with those who are most likely to be victims of crime, violence, and those who are subjected to the force of law without its full protection or justice.

This paper uses the case of Sweden to reflect on a broader set of challenges to the discipline with a focus on questions about knowledge production, how we know what we know and what we do with it:

Knowledge production: what is criminological knowledge for, for whom, and from where?
Emancipation: How can criminology be part of an emancipatory project? Can the research identify or promote access to justice? For whom?
Methodological pluralism: How can critical criminology increase its relevance and cultural cache through more creative methods and tools, including participatory methods and deliberation? Should it?
Scales of criminology: how has mass mobility and de-territorialization changed the scale and scope of criminology? As its objects of study cross borders through local, national, global and transnational planes, how does justice travel? Can it? What is justice for nomads? Why would it matter?

In the criminological field, the production of knowledge in certain "central" places - historically constituted as such in the framework of imperialism and colonialism in its various forms and dimensions - has become globally dominant. This has often been reflected in a dependency and subordination of researchers from "peripheral" contexts, which translated into forms of assimilation, reinforcing the claimed universality of "central" concepts and arguments.

However, these travels of criminologies also often took on more complex forms, in which what was imported was subjected to adaptations and rejections by "peripheral" researchers, giving rise to innovations of varying intensity. Exploring these metamorphoses of criminological vocabularies in "peripheral" contexts is an important part of the decolonial imperative of this field and implies both rewriting its history and redescribing its present landscape. This paper argues for the centrality of this task and presents some concrete examples from the remote and recent past as well as the present of criminologies in Latin America.