African Criminology Journal: a comparative evidence study of African Criminology Journal pathways, implementation constraints, and policy implications in Africa

The present analysis reframes African criminology around translation rather than transfer. It argues that crime, policing and punishment in Africa are organised by three coexisting pathways, state penalism inherited from colonial codes, plural policing anchored in chieftaincy, vigilante, religious and commercial providers, and restorative experiments that rework customary dispute resolution, and that reform vocabularies imported from the Global North misread this coexistence as deficit. Drawing on doctrinal analysis, legal history and comparative criminological synthesis rather than new fieldwork, the article shows how bifurcated sovereignty, fiscal scarcity and legitimacy deficits transform familiar constraints into jurisdictional facts that condition what penal law can do. It proposes a disciplined grammar for comparison that treats similarity of statute as a weak predictor of similarity of practice and evaluates policy by jurisdictional fit, sequencing and reversibility rather than by fidelity to external models.