Towards culture-inclusive criminology in Asia

Mainstream criminology has been mainly developed in the US and other English-speaking countries. With an expansion of criminology outside the English-speaking world, several scholars have started to cast doubts on the applicability of current mainstream criminology in their regions because it has failed to account for cultural differences. This question has led to a call for an “indigenized” criminology, in which knowledge and discourses are derived from or fixed to align with unique cultural contexts in each region. In this vein, Liu (2009, 2016, 2017a, 2017b) has proposed Asian Criminology. While it has significantly contributed to the development of criminology in Asia, we see two challenges in Liu’s Asian Criminology: lack of consideration for cultural diversity within Asia and its focus on the individualism–collectivism continuum. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach to developing criminology in Asia, which we call culture-inclusive criminology. It builds on a premise that Asia consists of a variety of cultural zones, and therefore calls for a shift from the Euro-American view on culture towards an understanding of culture in its context. Its goal is to develop indigenized criminologies in each cultural zone of Asia under an umbrella of culture-inclusive criminology.