Decolonization of Criminology and Justice

Editorial 5(1)

Adele N. Norris — 2023-07-27

Māori Sovereignty or Death

Arama Rata — 2023-07-27

In her 1984 book ‘Māori Sovereignty’, Donna Awatere sustains a blistering polemic on ‘white culture’ that still retains its rhetorical force 40 years later. Her construction of a sharply delineated binary between a monolithic notion of ‘white culture’ as against ‘taha Māori’ can come at the cost of simplification. But this is not at all to say that Awatere is wrong when she says it is ‘Māori Sovereignty or death’. In this paper, we extend Awatere’s work by analysing relationships between colonialism and capital. We begin by situating Awatere’s work in its historical context, outlining major shifts in the global political economy, and drawing on Awatere’s analysis of Fascism to account for contemporary Far Right movements. Building from the inextricability of Fascism from the settler colonial/imperialist economy, we explore Awatere’s framing of whiteness as a system of racial exploitation and violence that enforces the state’s genocidal claims to sovereignty, defined through necropower – capitalism’s consumption of racialised death. We then consider the contradictions between capitalism and constitutional transformation. By scanning revolutionary movements elsewhere (in particular the Chilean movement for plurinationalism), we identify the need for extra-parliamentary, broad-based, popular power and constituent authority from below, as well as Indigenous solidarities and international alliances to circumvent anti-Māori populism and confront capital. In reflecting on the power of death, and the need for counter-hegemonic culture capable of securing the transition out of capitalism, we are drawn to the revolutionary essence of whakapapa as an Indigenous ontology that eternally resists necropower.

Donna Awatere on Whiteness in New Zealand: Theoretical Contributions and Contemporary Relevance

Adele N Norris — 2023-07-27

In June 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern designated the US-based neo-fascist groups The Base and the Proud Boys as terrorist organisations. This designation marks one of the few times white supremacy entered the national political discourse in New Zealand. Discourses of whiteness are mostly theorised in the North American context. However, Donna Awatere’s 1984 examination of White Cultural Imperialism (WCI) in her book Māori Sovereignty advanced an analysis of whiteness in New Zealand that has received limited scholarly attention and is essentially unexplored. This paper reintroduces Awatere’s conceptualisation of WCI. It offers core tenets of WCI and theoretical insights into contemporary discussions of white supremacy that move beyond the focus of individuals and groups to a broader national framework of New Zealand. Two interrelated features of WCI, as defined by Awatere, are the minimisation and normalisation of whiteness and white racial hostility – inherent features that maintain, protect, and reproduce the white institutionalised body as the primary beneficiary of Western European domination that will always thwart Indigenous sovereignty and equality. This paper concludes that Awatere’s articulation of WCI links whiteness in the New Zealand context to the broader network of global white supremacy that offers insight into contemporary criminal justice scholarship.

Donna Awatere’s Māori Sovereignty: Reflections on White Supremacy and the Racialization of Crime Control and Surveillance in Aotearoa New Zealand

Brian Dawson — 2023-07-27

Donna Awatere’s examination of whiteness within the Aotearoa New Zealand context, specifically white cultural imperialism, has largely been ignored in academic scholarship. For her, white culture, and its articulation through governance and policy, is the starting point and lens to understanding and addressing historical and contemporary Māori dispossession and ensuing strategies of racialized surveillance, control, and containment. In this essay, we argue that Awatere’s attention to past forms of genocide – mapping them to emerging forms of state confinement of Māori, which engender genocidal characteristics, and problematizing “whiteness” – situates the book Māori Sovereignty as an important text in the field of criminal justice, especially that which manifests in settler-colonial contexts.

Awatere’s Māori Sovereignty Reveals the Obscured Core of Capitalism

Darelle Howard — 2023-07-27

The effects of capitalism are ubiquitous; however, the core is obscured behind hegemonic power that serves to continuously disempower and exploit the vast majority of people and the environment. As the neoliberal project unleashes capitalism on a global scale (Neilson, 2020, 2021), Marx’s early prediction that capitalism would spread to the four corners of the globe is reflected in the domination of capitalism in this social formation. However, this domination is by no means a homogenous experience. White supremacy runs through the veins of capitalism, weaving assertions of white superiority through the terrain that is wrenched open by colonial projects. Capitalism as a mode of production was thrust upon Māori in Aotearoa. Capitalism displaced (and displaces) the Māori mode of production, a way of life that is fundamentally antithetical to the individualised, privatised, exploitative mode of production foisted upon these lands by British colonialists and their descendants.

Wrestling with Biculturalism in Social Work Education

Kelly Glubb-Smith — 2023-07-27

When approached to write a piece on Donna Awatere’s (1984) book Māori Sovereignty from a social work perspective we seized the opportunity to reconsider her work. Revisiting the text after a 30-year-plus hiatus sparked a series of reflective conversations about how we wrestle with teaching biculturalism and our efficacy in preparing students for bicultural practice realities. This article draws upon our co-constructed narratives about what it means to be a social work educator in a bicultural practice landscape. Social work students graduate into an exceedingly complex practice environment fraught with tension about how to resolve inequities across the micro-to-macro continuum. The focus of this article is how Donna Awatere’s work is reflected in the tensions and responsibilities experienced when socialising students into the bicultural mission of social work practice in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Redhorse Bennett, C. (2022). Our Fight Has Just Begun: Hate Crimes and Justice in Native America. University of Arizona Press. 232 pp. USD 29.95 (pbk), USD 100.00 (hbk). ISBN: 978-0816541676.

Kevin Angelo Brown — 2023-07-27