Elena Vasiliou, Brunilda Pali, Marijke Van Buggenhout, Lior Volinz, and Mattias Lucien De Backer. “A call for epistemic disobedience in the face of the European Society of Criminology’s silence on Palestine”, Justice, Power and Resistance (published online ahead of print 26 Oct 2026 )
https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2026D000000089
Abstract
This article examines the European Society of Criminology’s (ESC) refusal to condemn Israel’s genocide in Gaza as an epistemic event that exposes how knowledge, silence, and institutional power are produced within criminology. Drawing on fieldnotes, public statements, and the Motion introduced by Criminologists for Palestine at the ESC General Assembly in Athens (2025), we analyse how appeals to neutrality, academic freedom, dialogue, and institutional procedure and power were used to avoid accountability and silence demands for action. These mechanisms are forms of governance that preserve criminology’s alignment with state power and sustain its distance from colonial and genocidal violence. Reading the events that took place in Athens in dialogue with feminist, decolonial, and critical criminology, we show how these mechanisms operate as ideological and discursive mechanisms of denial and strategic ignorance, working together to shape the discipline’s boundaries. We conclude by foregrounding epistemic disobedience as a necessary practice for confronting criminology’s complicities and for imagining forms of knowledge that refuse silence in the face of injustice.
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Neutrality becomes a mechanism of insulation, protecting criminology’s institutional alliances with state and legal authority. As Foucault (1980) argued, disciplines determine what can be said and who can say it. Within criminology, the language of ‘science’, ‘evidence’, and ‘reform’ establishes the limits of critique, rendering colonial violence, occupation, siege, and genocide external to its epistemic boundaries (Agozino, 2003; Morrison, 2004; Tauri, 2013; Pali, 2023; Deckert, 2025; Vasiliou, 2025).
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