In this book, renowned anthropologists Jean and John L. Comaroff make a startling but absolutely convincing claim about our modern era: it is not by our arts, our politics, or our science that we understand ourselves it is by our crimes. Surveying an astonishing range of forms of crime and policing from petty thefts to the multibillion-dollar scams of too-big-to-fail financial institutions to the collateral damage of war they take readers into the disorder of the late modern world. Looking at recent transformations in the triangulation of capital, the state, and governance that have led to an era where crime and policing are ever more complicit, they offer a powerful meditation on the new forms of sovereignty, citizenship, class, race, law, and political economy of representation that have arisen. To do so, the Comaroffs draw on their vast knowledge of South Africa, especially, and its struggle to build a democracy founded on the rule of law out of the wreckage of long years of violence and oppression. There they explore everything from the fascination with the supernatural in policing to the extreme measures people take to prevent home invasion, drawing illuminating comparisons to the United States and United Kingdom. Going beyond South Africa, they offer a global criminal anthropology that attests to criminality as the constitutive fact of contemporary life, the vernacular by which politics are conducted, moral panics voiced, and populations ruled

Since its initial 2011 publication, Theory from the South has stimulated a new field of inquiry from leading scholars, while world developments have escalated and supported its original thesis of how "Euroamerica has evolved toward Africa." Not least of these is the many resemblances of the Trump presidency to that of Jacob Zuma, transformations in the nature of many of the world's Northern democracies, the rise of populist politics, the intensifying hold of private capital over functions of the state, sharpening inequalities, and the transformation of labor. In a new chapter for this expanded edition, the Comaroffs extend their theorizing around and beyond these new developments. Critique and discussion by several prominent commentators round out this new edition: Achille Mbembe, James Ferguson, Ato Quayson, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Juan Obarrio.