In Southern Theory, Raewyn Connell (2007) analysed the impact of global divisions in political, economic, cultural and military power on the production of knowledge. Based on the experience of a small number of societies in the Global North, she argued, social science had succeeded in representing itself, and being widely accepted, as universal, timeless and placeless. Connell was centrally concerned with sociology, but as we will seek to show, her argument applies with equal force to criminology, although we do not wish to construct on overly reductive account of this knowledge/power effect. Accordingly, we outline the case for the development of a more transnational criminology that is inclusive of the experiences and perspectives of the Global South, that adopts methods and concepts that bridge global divides and that embraces the democratization of knowledge production as a political aspiration. Importantly, in making the argument for southern criminology, it is not our purpose to simply add one more candidate to the expanding list of new criminologies and thus contribute to what many regard as the growing fragmentation of the field (Bosworth and Hoyle 2011: 3). Southern criminology is a political project as well as a theoretical and empirical one as we now endeavour to explain.