Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. It essentially falls into three categories that can be loosely defined as: Othering in the penal sphere; Othering, immigration and the control of strangers; and the social process of Othering. This chapter challenges a number of Anglospheric assumptions about the Indigenous Other and reinstates the ongoing importance of place as the locus for struggles between settler states and Indigenous peoples. The book provides a critical analysis of social distancing in action and, when appropriate, a discussion of where morality is located within such processes and outcomes. It opens with a chapter by Peter Scharff Smith, a Danish human rights scholar and penologist who explores and questions Bauman's thesis on the Holocaust and what it means for a re-examination of genocide, and, importantly, for the discipline of criminology.