It has been nearly 15 years since the 2007 anti-terrorism police raids targeting the Ngāi Tūhoe (Tuhoe) iwi (tribe) who reside in the center of New Zealand's North Island. The violent treatment inflicted upon Tūhoe by New Zealand Police and the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) raised questions around the policing and punishing of Indigenous expressions of dissent. In light of recent events, revisiting how policymakers addressed the Raids offers much-needed critical analysis of the policing and surveillance of Māori in the contemporary context. This qualitative study seeks to understand how policymakers framed the 2007 Raids in discussions of crime control policy after the fact. A content analysis of Hansard's (parliamentary) debates of the 2009 Organised Crime Bill reveals that the Raids emerged primarily in discussions to expand police powers and implement harsher penalties for gang-related activity. Green, Māori, and the Labor parties framed the Raids as an act of state violence, a failed operation, a waste of taxpayers’ dollars, and a repeat of similar, historical acts of state violence against the Tūhoe people. Taking the Raids as a point of departure, the second part of the paper argues that two key events reveal a continuing project focused on the extensive policing and surveillance of Indigenous bodies in Aotearoa New Zealand: (1) the Armed Response Team (ART) trials of 2020, and (2) the ongoing extralegal photographing of Māori youth by law enforcement. These events are discussed as chronic acts of violence that lead to different life outcomes for survivors.

On Tuesday, December 29, 2020, 16 protesters at Waikeria Prison, one of New Zealand's largest male prisons, engaged in a six-day standoff with prison guards to protest inhumane prison conditions. The Department of Corrections framed the event as an aimless riot, delegitimizing the intentional demonstration of resistance against state violence. Imprisoned intellectuals, specifically Imprisoned Black Radical tradition, have long examined and centered the prison as the harshest instrument of the state linked to the struggles of the collective. However, voices from imprisoned intellectuals are rarely considered in academic scholarship despite acute analysis of the state and liberation. This article employs the state of exception to contextualize the Waikeria protest. Particular attention is devoted to the 'state of continuity,' which allows for a broader understanding of a permanent state of racialized oppression and marginalization faced by Indigenous and Black communities in racialized-settler-colonial contexts. Populations designated as the exception are thus framed as a threat targeted for militaristic police intervention. This article concludes by extending the discussion of the state of continuity to include how expressions of rage and dissent by Indigenous and Black people are viewed as a direct threat to the sovereign order but are necessary for revolutionary change.

On 1 August 2021, then New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern issued a formal apology for the historical violent policing of Pacific people during the 1970s Dawn Raids. The Dawn Raids were state-sanctioned police raids and random street checks targeting solely Pacific Island overstayers primarily in the Auckland area (Ongley & Pearson, 1995). Within the last decade, a nationwide housing crisis has emerged in Aotearoa New Zealand reflecting the impacts of a combination of factors: a sharp decline in homeownership, a shortage of affordable quality homes and an increasing demand for emergency housing (Bourassa & Shi, 2017; White & Nandedkar, 2019). Al Jazeera’s recent investigative documentary New Zealand: A Place to Call Home (2020) explores the housing crisis with a specific focus on the rental market. The documentary opens by exploring the efforts of the advocacy group Auckland Action Against Poversity (AAAP) to house Aucklanders.

Donna Awatere’s examination of whiteness within the Aotearoa New Zealand context, specifically white cultural imperialism, has largely been ignored in academic scholarship. For her, white culture, and its articulation through governance and policy, is the starting point and lens to understanding and addressing historical and contemporary Māori dispossession and ensuing strategies of racialized surveillance, control, and containment. In this essay, we argue that Awatere’s attention to past forms of genocide – mapping them to emerging forms of state confinement of Māori, which engender genocidal characteristics, and problematizing “whiteness” – situates the book Māori Sovereignty as an important text in the field of criminal justice, especially that which manifests in settler-colonial contexts.

In June 2022, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern designated the US-based neo-fascist groups The Base and the Proud Boys as terrorist organisations. This designation marks one of the few times white supremacy entered the national political discourse in New Zealand. Discourses of whiteness are mostly theorised in the North American context. However, Donna Awatere’s 1984 examination of White Cultural Imperialism (WCI) in her book Māori Sovereignty advanced an analysis of whiteness in New Zealand that has received limited scholarly attention and is essentially unexplored. This paper reintroduces Awatere’s conceptualisation of WCI. It offers core tenets of WCI and theoretical insights into contemporary discussions of white supremacy that move beyond the focus of individuals and groups to a broader national framework of New Zealand. Two interrelated features of WCI, as defined by Awatere, are the minimisation and normalisation of whiteness and white racial hostility – inherent features that maintain, protect, and reproduce the white institutionalised body as the primary beneficiary of Western European domination that will always thwart Indigenous sovereignty and equality. This paper concludes that Awatere’s articulation of WCI links whiteness in the New Zealand context to the broader network of global white supremacy that offers insight into contemporary criminal justice scholarship.

Within the last decade, the notion of a housing crisis emerged as a key issue on national political agendas across nation-states. The overall decline in homeownership is even sharper along racial lines. The way race/ethnicity is captured in housing research has important implications for how racial disparities are explained and addressed. This paper uses a critical discourse analysis to examine how ethnicity and race are represented in New Zealand housing research published between 2013 and 2019. The analysis reveals a lack of attention devoted to explaining racial disparities in housing research. Only one article from a sample of 103 referenced the concepts ‘racism’ and ‘institutional racism’ to explain institutional barriers that adversely affect Indigenous people engaging with home-lending institutions. This paper argues that housing scholarship is an important space for understanding how policies institutionalize racism to exclude marginalized bodies, especially through predatory lending practices, loan denial, and segregation. This paper concludes with a discussion of the social implications of race-neutral explanations of housing-related issues.

In the New Zealand 2020 cannabis referendum, 50.7% of all voters rejected the creation of a legally-regulated cannabis market and instead supported retaining the current prohibitionist policy. Although the referendum failed to pass, a majority of Māori voted in favor of cannabis law reform. This paper suggests that within the Māori community there is a more nuanced appreciation of the impact of policing cannabis. Māori perceive that greater harm is caused by the racialized policing of cannabis than by the usage of it. Following McCreanor, et al. (2014), this paper employs a thematic, content analysis of the New Zealand Herald’s coverage of the 2020 cannabis referendum to investigate the presence of race-based targeting/policing in discussions of the legislation. The results reveal that racial disparities emerged as secondary to framing both the impact of cannabis and the referendum as race-neutral and affecting everyone in society equally. This paper argues that the impact of the policing of this particular drug impacts Māori differently, wherein they bear the brunt of racialized policing. Thus, Māori possess a more sophisticated understanding that warrants consideration because it is inextricably linked to lived experiences of policing that differ from wider social narratives of policing and drug policy in New Zealand.

It is well established that negative stigmas are used to dehumanise and to limit, restrict, and deny assistance to poor and racially marginalised populations, especially single mothers. While scholars have examined racial social control with regard to gangs, how the stigma of gang affiliation influences access to quality housing has been scantly examined in New Zealand. Employing discourse analysis to examine parliamentary speeches regarding the Organised Crime Bill and Residential Tenancy Amendment Bill (2009–2018), this project explores how gangs are framed in housing-related political discourse. Findings reveal that language used by policymakers constructs gangs as being associated largely with Māori through three main tactics: referencing ‘ethnic’ gangs as the only entity/focus of organised crime; omitting Pākehā/White gangs and white-collar crime; and identifying areas/towns with high Māori populations as in need of targeted social control. Such framing strategies fashioned a criminalising narrative around Māori as gang members and as inherently violent that permeates housing-related political rhetoric used to frame ‘bad’ or ‘undesirable’ tenants enabling policymakers to stigmatise Māori as the ‘criminal other’. This motif carries severe implications with regard to life chances of Māori women, especially as it relates to housing screening practices and the ability to secure social housing.

In light of contemporary racial justice issues in the United States, the academic classroom can be a precarious environment to engage in intellectually humble dialogue on racial injustice. This chapter expands upon the concept of epistemic exploitation raised in Nora Berenstain’s 2016 article, which explains the exploitative and emotionally taxing burden marginalized persons feel when compelled to educate privileged persons about their unearned privilege and the nature of marginalized person’s oppression. I argue that epistemic exploitation is more likely to occur in academic classrooms if white guilt and fragility are not acknowledged and neutralized. My assertion is based on the premise that as racial justice conversations increasingly occur, the need to satisfy white fragility exceeds the need to engage in healthy discussions on racism and white supremacy. Race is, therefore, deemphasized and other social status markers (e.g., gender, class, age, sexuality orientation) are overly emphasized or are used as proxies for race. In such cases, colonizing narratives of groups racialized as non-white are perpetuated via colorblind explanations about social problems.

Protests and resistance from those locked away in jails, prisons and detention centers occur but receive limited, if any, mainstream attention. In the United States and Canada, 61 instances of prisoner unrest occurred in 2018 alone. In August of the same year, incarcerated men and women in the United States planned nineteen days of peaceful protest to improve prison conditions. Complex links of institutionalized power, white supremacy and Black resistance is receiving renewed attention; however, state-condoned violence against women in correctional institutions (e.g., physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and medical neglect by prison staff) is understudied. This qualitative case study examines 10 top-tier Criminology journals from 2008-2018 for the presence of prisoner unrest/protest. Findings reveal a paucity of attention devoted to prisoner unrest or state-sanctioned violence. This paper argues that the invisibility of prisoner unrest conceals the breadth and depth of state-inflicted violence against prisoners, especially marginalized peoples. This paper concludes with a discussion of the historical legacy and contemporary invisibility of Black women’s resistance against state-inflicted violence. This paper argues that in order to make sense of and tackle state-condoned violence we must turn to incarcerated individuals, activists, and Black and Indigenous thinkers and grassroots actors.

This fascinating and original work explores the experiences of third-culture children of African descent in New Zealand. The term ‘third-culture kid’ refers to an individual who grows up in a culture different from the culture of their parents. Experiences of youth of African descent is under-researched in New Zealand. The central research focus explores racialised emotions internalised by African youth that are largely attributed to a lack of positive media representation of African and/or black youth, coupled with daily experiences of micro-aggressions and structural racism. In this respect, the case-study analysis is reflective of careful, methodological and deliberative analysis, which offers powerful insights into the grass-roots strategies employed by African youth to resist negative stereotypes that problematise and marginalise them politically and economically.

The imprisonment rate in New Zealand ranks seventh among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet the imprisonment of Indigenous people is on par with the United States, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Almost 70% of the prison population in New Zealand is comprised of people racialized as non-White. In 2016, the National Government proposed to spend $2.5 billion over a 5-year period to build new prisons (1,500 prison beds) to accommodate a growing prison population. This study assessed public attitudes toward the need for more prisons and the equity of treatment of individuals within the criminal justice system. Findings from a 2016 and 2017 quantitative survey of 5,000 respondents each year revealed that roughly half of the respondents believed the proposed spending for new prisons to be extremely to somewhat necessary. A large proportion of respondents also believed Māori and Pākehā, if convicted of the same crime, are treated similarly within the criminal justice system. New Zealand scholars have critiqued news media coverage of contentious sociopolitical issues, such as crime and prisons, for employing tactics that have worked to construct a morally and culturally deficit “Other” while normalizing whiteness, rendering it invisible and raceless. This article concludes that this process masks racial disparities of individuals located within the criminal justice system and preserves the ideal that prisons are a normal function of the social landscape.

Noken is an essential tool/bag/clothing in the lives of Indigenous people of West Papua, which is made from knitting thin strips of wood primarily from the Gnetum Gnemon tree. Raw materials required to make noken have become scarce due to massive deforestation. An analysis of the noken lends itself to a useful understanding of the link between economic development initiatives in the Merauke Regency of West Papua and shifting cultural identity among Indigenous Papuans. Drawing on the Women, Culture and Development (WCD) approach, this qualitative study examines interviews from Papuan women in order to understand how the noken resonates with Indigenous Papuans, and how perceptions of noken and their accessibility have changed. The findings reveal that a combination of factors contribute to dwindling noken supplies, which adversely impact Papuans’ ability to produce and reproduce their culture. This paper argues that Papuan women possess an unwritten specialized knowledge that is of increased value in a shifting social context and holds new meaning in response to competing influences of non-Papuans.

The sharp rise in female incarceration rates in both the United States and New Zealand has received increased attention. Even more pressing are the racial disparities among imprisoned females. This exploratory case study examines 13 peer-reviewed articles published between 2005 and 2016 to understand the nature of colour-blind ideology in discussions of female imprisonment in New Zealand. Several themes emerged including the homogenisation of female prisoners. Apart from moderately linking vast racial disparities between incarcerated White women and Indigenous women to ill-defined colonial practices, contemporary explanations for the substantial racial disparities receive little attention. This article concludes that the absence of a critical lens toward contemporary forms and experiences of racism undergirding the mass criminalisation of Indigenous people perpetuates a colour blindness that in turn works to normalise mass female incarceration. Even in attempts to be unbiased, the way race/ethnicity, gender, age, and class are discussed in academic research exploring female incarceration seems to reflect the influential nature of controlling images rather than critique them.

Ample research exists on the relationship between mainstream constructions of racialized images and perceptions of criminals. Fewer studies, however, have assessed the influence of political rhetoric in the construction and the mobilization of images of criminals as the "racial other." This study employs a qualitative content analysis guided by an intersectionality framework to answer the questions: to what extent Presidential rhetoric influenced images of criminals; and how was colorblind language used to facilitate this process? The examination of Presidential speeches related to crime policies, given from 1969 to 1996, revealed that criminal activity was primarily articulated as being committed by "young Black impoverished males." Through the use of colorblind strategies, race, while not explicitly referenced, was the most salient dimension of the imagery of criminals depicted in Presidential rhetoric.

Intersectionality is gaining ground as a desired way of deepening our understanding of persisting inequalities engendered by poverty. Combining an intersectional framework and the idea of strategic gender needs developed by Moser (1993), this study explores the experiences and perceptions of empowerment among rural black and white women in the southern U.S. and highlights the significance of intersectionality in exploring such issues. The findings reveal a diversity of experiences and perceptions of empowerment within the broader construction of womanhood. This paper raises the question about the shared identity of womanhood in rural southern communities. Such an understanding compels us to look closer at how oppressive ideologies become embedded within institutional structures and constrain our understanding of rural poverty. Additionally, this understanding calls us to investigate the capacity of anti-poverty and asset development efforts to work for different groups of women. Efforts such as these hold major implications for the social work profession and others who are challenged to understand and adequately address poverty in rural communities.

Rural U. S. poverty rates have been persistently high. Market-based anti-poverty strategies, specifically microenterprise programs, have gained currency as a feasible avenue for moving women out of poverty. While rural women may share some commonality, homogeneity among rural women is often assumed in poverty scholarship. It is imperative that poverty scholars contribute to closing the gap between theoretical explanations and the actually experiences of poverty among individuals occupying different social locations. As researchers address this gap, this article argues for the value of integrating two important components consistent with black feminist epistemology: (1) an intersectionality perspective, and (2) the voices of the local actors/stakeholders. This article concludes that without a purposeful examination of individuals located at the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and/or class; even carefully formulated policy can inadvertently discriminate against or benefit some women more than others.

Traditionally, poverty scholarship in the U.S. focuses on the levels, trends, and effects of poverty across social categories broadly defined either by race (minorities) or gender (women) or age (children). An intersectional perspective elucidates the complexity of people's social locations by conceptualizing race, class, gender as simultaneously interacting power relations. In this work, we suggest how an intersectional approach can benefit our understanding of social inequalities in rural areas in an effort to better inform rural poverty research and policies. A related goal is to encourage a more thorough integration of class and age inequalities in intersectional scholarship. We conclude by discussing the benefits of a dialog between rural poverty research and an intersectionality perspective.