As a critical criminologist from the Global North, my initial understanding of drug courts has been largely shaped by metropole-centric literature. Implemented as specialised criminal courts providing judicially monitored treatment for problematic substance use, drug courts have faced extensive critique. Scholars such as Victoria Malkin and Kerwin Kaye have described these courts as coercive rehabilitative institutions imbued with neoliberal ideas of individual responsibility and productivity, divorced from wider social conditions, and lacking provisions of shared social care. Based on these insights, I perceived these institutions as a tool of neoliberal social control where marginalisation and disadvantage are obscured by a rhetoric of failed self-responsibilisation. In this blog post, I reflect on how a decolonial lens in my doctoral research has nonetheless challenged the subjectivities of this contextually limited intellectual foundation, triggering a complex process of confronting uncritical theory importation. 

Keen to explore drug court settings overlooked because of their “globally peripheral” position, my doctoral project turned to Chile, a jurisdiction where these courts emerged amidst the tensions of democratic transition. Following the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-1990), Chile underwent rights-oriented penal restructuring and the implementation of alternative resolutions to criminal offences, which included the provision of drug treatment. Yet, alongside these transformations, neoliberal structures originally established during the former authoritarian regime remained intact. Consequently, as rights-focused justice was being consolidated, economic insecurity and social fragmentation endured, whereas public support for punitiveness increased. In this context, my study of drug courts produced a different critique than those typically offered by Global North-based perspectives. My ethnographic fieldwork suggested that, against the tensions of Chilean democratic transition, these courts became sites where social control was negotiated and contested directly and proactively by defendants and court staff alike.  

However, generating these nuanced, distinct findings was possible only after an imperfect, long-winded, and sustained endeavour to align my research with regional decolonial approaches, specifically marginal criminological realism. Rooted in Raúl Zaffaroni’s work, marginal criminological realism confronts, as Garcia and Sozzo explain, ‘the problem of hierarchy, asymmetry and dependency’ that can arise when theories developed in the global, imperial “core” are imported uncritically into Latin American contexts. For Zaffaroni, the region’s history of peripheral capitalism, with its colonial, authoritarian continuities, makes violence a distinctively ‘permanent component’ of both penal institutions and Latin American societies at large. The goal of empirical research subsequently is to produce knowledge that can inform opposition to this operative violence. 

Correspondingly, Zaffaroni argues it is imperative to develop a ‘syncretic critique’. Such a critique does not automatically dismiss theories built in Global North contexts, as they may still reflect, to an extent, local experience. Rather, syncretism forefronts the specific histories and lived realities of the margins in the production of knowledge. For my research in Chile, this approach set a key task: studying drug courts without unquestionably reproducing the assumptions of the metropole-centric scholarship through which I had first encountered them. 

Ethnography offered one way forward, but, on its own, could not guarantee a faithful reflection of marginal reality. Ethnographers from the Global North have long filtered the voices of people in the “peripheries” through their own assumptions and categories. Thus, overriding the dominance of metropole-centric subjectivities required a more proactive and resilient methodological exercise, with reflection, reiteration, and realignment underpinning each research stage. 

Uncritical importation of assumed positions can surface often and in diverse, unexpected ways. In my case, months of virtual and in-person ethnography showcased a genuine co-existence of neoliberal social control and multi-faceted, rights-driven resistance within Chilean drug courts. Nevertheless, I struggled to reconcile this complexity, given the more straightforward narratives that had shaped my initial understanding. I caught myself weighing beyond standard academic rigour the possibility that rights-oriented attitudes were merely performative. Delay, trial, and error then underpinned the process of veridically gauging the balance between reinforcement and contestation of social control. At times, the push and pull between familiar theoretical frameworks and a syncretic, decolonial approach left room for rigid, myopic interviewing. Other times, tendencies of uncritical importation impacted which considerations featured more prominently in my fieldnotes and which were unfortunately downplayed.   

Amidst these struggles and missteps, open, horizontal dialogue became crucial to anchoring my research in marginal realities. Reflection, reiteration, and realignment did not occur in isolation. They were prompted by honest conversations with court stakeholders – by sharing my doubts and interpretations and allowing their subsequent perspectives to adjust my inquiry. At later stages, feedback from Latin American scholars strengthened marginal realist alignment, exposing lingering binary thinking in how I had interpreted findings. Decolonial methodology thus encompassed continuous conversation and resilient reckoning with positional limitations. 

Marginal criminological realism did not find its way in my research through perfect, consistent methodological application. It was slowly built through error and continuous, honest confrontation of the metropole-centric subjectivities I held. My most significant leaps in decolonial reflexivity were not the result of solitary self-awareness, but of persistent dialogue and critique from others. As I now move to examine in depth how my findings may aid opposition to operative violence in the region, this exercise of decolonial reflexivity endures. For other socio-legal scholars engaged in similar approaches, I hope my reflections at this stage offer encouragement to embrace difficult moments of accountability and deconstruction. It may be precisely the pedagogical nature of these moments that genuinely creates decolonial work.