Why are some harms defined as crimes, while others are not? And who gets to decide? In this episode, Omar sits down with Dr Lynne Copson, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Open University, to explore the relationship between criminology and zemiology (the study of social harm), and to dig into her new edited collection, Crime, Harm and the State, co-edited with Dr Eleni Dimou and Dr Steve Tombs, published by Bristol University Press (2026). This collection disrupts the boundaries of conventional criminology, offering a bold and innovative exploration of crime, state power and social harm across historical and global contexts. Bridging zemiology, governmentality studies,and decolonial theory, it examines how the colonial roots and ongoing dynamics of global capitalism perpetuate harm — particularly in the Global South. Through case studies spanning tourism, drugs, non-human animals, food, ecology, minoritized groups and migration, the collection asks whose experiences of harm are acknowledged, and how harm may be resisted. We focus especially on Dr Copson's own chapter, Redrawing Borders: Crime, Harm and the State, in which she interrogates the ways in which scholarly knowledge is complicit in drawing borders and carving up the world — and argues that this isfar from a problem of the past. What are the unintended consequences of continuing with status quo scholarship? Along the way, we also get into the necessity of hope, what utopia means, the politics of citations, and a slight obsession with avocados... Key texts covered in our conversation: Copson, L., Dimou, E. & Tombs, S. (eds.) (2026) Crime, Harm and the State. Bristol: Bristol University Press. (We discussed Charter 14: Redrawing Borders: Crime Harm and the State) Copson, L. (2022) ‘Finding hope in hopeless times’, in van Klink, B., Soniewicka, M. and van den Broeke, L. (eds.) Utopian Thinking in Law, Politics, Architecture and Technology. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 19–37.DOI: 10.4337/9781803921402.00007 Copson, L. (2021) 'Crime,Harm and Justice: The Utopia of Harm and Realising Justice in a "Good Society"', in Davies, P., Leighton, P. & Wyatt, T. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Social Harm. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72408-5_13 We also mention: Alatas, S.F. (2024), The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Autonomous Knowledge Tradition. Sociology Compass, 18: e13256. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13256 Dimou, E. (2021) Decolonizing Southern Criminology: What Can the “Decolonial Option” Tell Us About Challenging the Modern/Colonial Foundations of Criminology? CriticalCriminology, 29, pp. 431–450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-021-09579-9 Podcast researched & hosted by Dr Omar Phoenix Khan, University of Bath. Theme music by SHEZ.
