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Against Disciplining and in Favour of Generosity: A Conversation with Nigel South

  • Writer: David R. Goyes
    David R. Goyes
  • Jun 2
  • 9 min read
Nigel South is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Essex, Department of Sociology and Criminology. His research encompasses, among other areas, private policing, drug markets and drug use, and environmental crime. His research on private policing and drug issues is widely cited, and he is recognised as one of the pioneers of green criminology. Some of his most referenced publications include Policing for Profit: The Private Security Sector (1988), Traffickers: Drug Markets and Law Enforcement (2002), and Protecting the Planet: A Proposal for a Law of Ecocide (2013). He received the 2013 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Criminology, Division on Critical Criminology and Social Justice, and in 2022, he received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the British Society of Criminology.
 
When asked about the themes that cut across his scholarship, he explained,

Power, exploitation, and private security…enclaves and the securitisation of environments that the very rich create for themselves. In the event of a global apocalypse or environmental doom, they will have their bunkers, cruise ships, and retreats, among other options [see Lam et al. 2023]. And that is protected by privatised forms of military and security…So I think power and the ownership of the planet, the ownership of resources, the protection of those resources—that is what private forces are about.
 
In this interview, recorded at the University of Oslo on 16 May 2025, Nigel explains the philosophy, views, and experiences that have shaped his academic trajectory. We discussed traits that enhance the career and contributions of a social scientist, the importance of acknowledging others’ work, and the emergence of green criminology in the Anglophone world.

Labels, Discipline, and Sole Heroes

Social constructivists have long known that words matter. The way we refer to reality or ourselves influences how we perceive life and behave within it. These are principles that cultural and narrative theorists have recently expanded productively (see, e.g., Sandberg, 2010). In our conversation, Nigel reminded us of the power of labels regarding the study of crime, harm, and deviance,

Criminologists would actually back then have called themselves sociologists or sociologists of deviance because criminology still had a very positivist kind of approach in the UK. It was dominated by places like Cambridge and was seen very much as a preserve of establishment criminology.

While the content and connotations of labels change over time, we must always be aware of how the labels we use for our fields and professions shape our perspective on the world and the phenomena we study.
 
Indeed, academic fields are disciplines that, as the word suggests, discipline. They forge subjectivities and the tools and perspectives with which we approach the world. In contemporary capitalist and neoliberal culture, discipline has a positive connotation (due to the productivity to which it leads), but it also has the downside of stifling creativity,

I do not see myself as a very disciplined scholar or intellectual, unlike some colleagues of mine. I think that is another manifestation of what Ken called the sociological imagination because you are constantly finding sociologically interesting things.

Nigel is not alone in productively avoiding discipline. Douglas Hofstadter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach, has challenged the limits of academic disciplines while also highlighting the artificial limits we create within our academic silos (see more here).
 
One of the harmful disciplinary views of the social sciences is that we need sole heroes who, through their genius, lead us to see the world differently (see Sandberg et al., 2021). In reality, no academic accomplishment is the result of one individual; we all build on the collective of ideas circulating in the atmosphere. Nigel learned to collaborate with teams during his time researching drugs,

The writing aspect with other people also became a necessity when I had a job in the 1980s working in the drug field at the Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, as we had small teams that worked, wrote, and published together. So, generally speaking, in alphabetical order, regardless of contribution. So that was another kind of good education about how to juggle multiple projects and work together and publish together and, you know, reduce the ego involved in writing together as well.

Challenging disciplining and the capitalist ethos, therefore, means going against the individualist spirit of our times, which seeks personal salvation and glory while forgetting solidarity, empathy, and the collective. Undisciplined scholars are generous and modest. Nigel explained how his mentors taught him these values,

Ken [Plummer] was also a solitary intellectual, but he was very generous with his ideas and wanted to inspire people. All of these are about broadening the sociological imagination in a liberating sort of way. Jock was always open to sharing ideas and collaborating. He was not yet THE Jock Young, and I thought, well, there is an interesting sort of example of how you can encourage people and work with people and get things on people's CVs. And I have always thought it was a rather obvious thing for us to do because once you are established, you do not really need to be trying to do that. You do not need to be trying to exploit other people or not give credit to other people.
 
Somewhat paradoxically, generous people tend to perform better and be more creative. They are what Adam Grant (2013) calls ‘Givers’, in opposition to ‘Takers’ who only think about their self-promotion and dream of becoming the sole stars of the show. Why might generosity reward those who practice it in academia? Because others share with you the gift of their experiences, ideas, and questions. When you comment on your colleagues’ drafts or peer review articles (even when this should be remunerated labour), you are spending time that you could use on your own writing, BUT you are also learning something new and taking new perspectives—all of which, not by plagiarism but by inspiration, can enhance your intellectual work. Talking about his interest in the global South, Nigel said that these interests were planted early on through collaborative work but emerged in his consciousness years later,

There were some formative influences that probably took a lot of time to emerge in my thinking. Some of that was partly due to you.
 
What are the harms of negative disciplining, individualism, and sole heroes? The first is the denial of others and their contributions, which has affected criminology,

So, again, that is a parallel with some of the critique of the way that Southern criminology took off without necessarily acknowledging people who had been there before or said very similar things. There is no problem with referencing in a footnote.

Denial of others equates to voluntary amnesia and epistemological injustice (see Goyes and South, 2019). It makes chosen individuals into sole geniuses (the reasons why they are chosen have to do with their belonging to the locations where society expects to find ‘geniuses’), to the detriment of other marginalised voices that had already exposed similar thoughts:
I could also get quite impatient or annoyed with Foucault scholars who would claim that all of this kind of work were insights that no one had ever had before. And actually, if you look at work by some American symbolic interactionists, their work is full of the minor regulations of everyday life that guide us.
 
One of the markers used to crown new stars has to do with their position on the global hierarchy of citizenship (Franko, 2021) and the associated evaluation of their knowledge (Goyes & Skilbrei, 2024),
Jock Young writes about the UK, many of the big names of the time in criminology, it seems to be very focused on Europe and the local. I suppose the rest of the world was not seen as having a voice.


The Emergence and Development of Green Criminology


Nothing comes out of the blue; all creative work builds on what came before. ‘Nothing is completely original,’ says artist Austin Kleon (2012). Nigel was among the first proponents of green criminology in the Anglophone academic world, and it came out of the inspiration of the times. The ideas were in the air,

I suppose, like many people's experiences, it is a combination of opportunities, personal interests and excitement when you think you have found something new to do. I had an interest in nature, in the environment, not in a mountain-climbing sort of way. I just liked being in the open in nature. And you have seen that I later got involved with some of our colleagues in biological sciences about their green exercise kind of project, and the idea that being in nature is good for your mental health, which always seemed to be a very self-evident idea [see Pretty et al, 2007]. But it appeared to take scientists quite a while. It took quite a long time to realise this. I am not quite sure why. So there was a personal interest. And then the opportunity was one I had inherited from Ken Plummer, actually, the only criminology course that the University of Essex had at the time, around 1994. And so I completely redid it...I wanted a section on new frontiers and criminologies, so radical history, feminism, and postmodernism. And I thought, what else can I add? And I thought, well, nobody really talks about the state of the planet, about environmental issues, which is really quite odd. And you can find it in corporate crime studies. There were quite a lot of American studies about corporate crime or the problems of unregulated big business, where the consequences, the impacts, were environmentally damaging to farmers, to populations, and so on.
 
Since then, green criminology as an academic framework has expanded and been enriched by multiple knowledge traditions and perspectives. Two frequently asked questions are: why do we need green criminology when so many other disciplines research environmental crime, and why should criminology engage with nature? Nigel explained what criminology brings to the table in the study of environmental harm and conflict,

Well, a lot and nothing. A lot because, of course, it is a different discipline. It has its own history, trajectory, and unique perspective on the world. And that is not just crime, of course, because one of the most significant things about green criminology has been the emphasis on harm. That’s been there right from the start. The label does not matter that much, as long as you are trying to pursue the general mission of saying the planet and the species that share it are not in good shape. We really need to bring this to everyone’s attention.
 
Despite the extensive work developed within green criminology, there are still areas for expansion. Nigel underscores two of them. First, ecofeminism,
There is relatively little work done on women, gender issues, or women and environmental issues. And I remember years ago there was a very stimulating, interesting book called The Rape of the Wild by Collard and Contrucci [1989], which was, from a feminist point of view, paralleling the masculine male rape of women and the masculine male rape of nature and the wild. It is a critique of masculinity and men and the way that they shape, militarise, and exploit. Ragnhild [Sollund, 2012] has done a little bit, and a few other people have done something. However, upon closer examination, it is striking that there is not more of a critical feminist or eco-feminist approach to green criminology.
 
And second, ‘The politics of the current moment, with the rise of populism... We have really got to understand political forces better.
 
Beyond the texts Nigel mentions, there are recent publications on green crime and gender, including the edited book Gendering Green Criminology by Wyatt and colleagues (2023). Also, some years ago, I started exploring the political dynamics through which environmental legislation is made (see Goyes, 2017). But, as Nigel said, much more work needs to be done from feminist perspectives and about political processes. Hopefully, new generations will fill the gap while embracing Nigel’s legacy of generosity, creativity, collaboration, and liberation from the disciplinary shackles.


References

Collard, A., & Contrucci, J. (1989). Rape of the Wild: Man's Violence against Animals and the Earth.

Dorn, N., Murji, K., & South, N. (2002). Traffickers: Drug markets and law enforcement. Routledge.

Franko, K. (2021). Lives that Matter: Criminology and Global Security Inequality. International Criminology, 1(1), 20-27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43576-021-00007-0

Goyes, D. R. (2017). Corporate lobbying and criminalization. Crime, Law & Social Change, 69, 401-419.

Goyes, D. R., & Skilbrei, M.-L. (2024). Rich scholar, poor scholar: inequalities in research capacity, "knowledge" abysses, and the value of unconventional approaches to research. Crime, Law and Social Change, 81(5), 469-488. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10105-x

Goyes, D. R., & South, N. (2017). Green Criminology Before 'Green Criminology': Amnesia and Absences [journal article]. Critical Criminology, 25(2), 165-181. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-017-9357-8

Grant, A. (2013). Give and take: A revolutionary approach to success. Penguin.

Higgins, P., Short, D., & South, N. (2013). Protecting the planet: a proposal for a law of ecocide. Crime, Law and Social Change, 59(3), 251–266. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9413-6

Hofstadter, D. R. (1999). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic books.

Kleon, A. (2012). Steal like an artist. 10 things nobody told you about being creative. Workman Publishing.

Lam, A., South, N., & Brisman, A. (2023). A convergence of crises: COVID-19, climate change and bunkerization. Crime, Media, Culture, 19(3), 327–344.

Pretty et al (2007) Green exercise in the UK countryside: Effects on health and psychological well-being, and implications for policy and planning. (2007). Journal of environmental planning and management, 50(2), 211-231.

Sandberg, S. (2010). What can "Lies" Tell Us about Life? Notes towards a Framework of Narrative Criminology. Journal of Criminal Justice Education, 21(4), 447–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2010.516564

Sandberg, S., & Ibarra Rojas, L. (2021). A Farewell to the Lone Hero Researcher: Team Research and Writing. Crime, Law and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-10006-x

Sollund, R. (2012). Victimisation of Women, Children and Non-human Species Through Trafficking and Trade: Crimes Understood Under an Ecofeminist Perspective. In N. South & A. Brisman (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology (pp. 317–330). Routledge International Handbooks.

South, N. (1988). Policing for profit: the private security sector. Sage.

Wyatt, T., Peggs, K., Heydon, J., Davies, P., & Milne, E. (2023). Gendering Green Criminology. Bristol University Press.
 
 
 

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