Arab Criminology & Decolonial AI Ethics
Published by Routledge and authored by Dr. Nabil Ouassini & Dr. Anwar Ouassini, Arab Criminology offers a long-overdue intervention in the field of criminology by centering Arab societies as sites of both knowledge production and political contestation. It challenges the Euro-American foundations of criminological thought and advances regional frameworks rooted in historical specificity, social struggle, and political resistance.
The book examines carceral power, state legitimacy, migration, surveillance, and protest across Arab contexts. From Tunisia to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon to the Gulf, the book highlights how criminological systems in the Arab world operate through both formal state institutions and informal mechanisms of moral governance.
In doing so, it also confronts the structural biases of mainstream criminology: its tendency to naturalize Western state models, its reliance on positivist tools of measurement, and its frequent neglect of colonial and postcolonial histories.
This work is especially relevant at a time when surveillance systems, biometric databases, and predictive algorithms are being deployed in both authoritarian and democratic regimes. Arab Criminology insists on the political and ethical stakes of these systems—particularly when applied to Muslim-majority societies that have long been targeted through the lenses of securitization, counterterrorism, and suspicion.
The work is a model for what decolonial AI ethics might look like in practice. It encourages us to:
Reconsider dominant models of surveillance and risk,
Integrate regional knowledge systems into governance frameworks, and
Acknowledge how AI and predictive technologies can perpetuate legacy harms in security, migration, and criminal justice.
Rather than simply critiquing Western frameworks, the volume offers alternatives. These include Islamic conceptions of justice, grassroots resistance movements, and non-state forms of mediation, all of which complicate the assumption that justice systems must mirror Western liberal norms to be valid or effective.
The volume is essential reading not only for criminologists, but also for scholars of digital ethics, surveillance studies, Islamic legal theory, Middle East politics, and sociology of law. It serves as a vital resource for understanding how global technologies—especially carceral and predictive ones—must be interpreted in local, decolonial, and religious terms.