Our group emerged from a concern among a large group of Australian, Aotearoa and Pasifika criminologists on the silence of our discipline in its response to the genocide in Gaza. Our thematic group retains a focus on genocide but also links to other connected concerns around decarceral and anticolonial theories, practices and activism, as well as broader intersecting work within critical criminology.

In addition to the silencing, what became apparent in our work on the Gaza genocide is the interconnections between genocide and the extensive reach that a critical anti-genocidal, interdisciplinary criminology might embody. The events in Gaza cut across many matters of widespread importance to criminology. A non-exhaustive list includes child protection/removal, corporate crime, crimmigration and refugees, critical terrorism studies, disability justice, discrimination and violence against women, ecocide and environmental criminology, global criminology, human rights, Indigenous knowledges and justice, green criminology, media, policing, racism and Islamophobia, settler colonialism and coloniality, state crime, teaching and research in criminology, victimology, war crimes, and youth justice.

While we maintain the emphasis on genocide, decolonial and decarceral approaches, we also broaden the linkages to critical criminology to engage with the matters identified above. We refrain from defining (and thereby limiting) critical criminology but see it as an open-ended approach that locates ‘crime’ and state responses within broader structural and
institutional contexts which are politically and historically determined and contested. Our focus is both international and local national settings. For example, we see First Nations justice in both Australia and Aotearoa as a core motivation and rationale for our work in this thematic group. It exemplifies the need to see the interrelationships between genocide,
decarceral and anticolonial approaches, as well as a broad range of more specific concerns from raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility, to the effects of extractive industries and environmental degradation on First Nations’ land and waters.

Ultimately, our core concern in this thematic group is not ‘what works’ in criminology but what liberates, what diminishes oppression, and what maximises the potential and new possibilities for human and environmental ecosystems. We aim to promote research, activism, theorising and pedagogy in a collegial and supportive environment that fulfills this end.