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Intersectionality scholarship has yet to systematically recognize the importance of citizenship status for the mutual shaping of inequalities. In this article, we bring attention to the combined structuring force of criminal law and citizenship status (and the related concepts of ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’ status) in intersecting with other categories of social disadvantage, such as those created by racialization, class, gender and ethnicity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with women in prisons for ‘foreign nationals’ and health clinics for ‘undocumented’ migrants in Norway and Denmark, this article shows how citizenship status has a central role in the co-constitution of gendered, classed and racialized social disadvantages.

Collective memory of atrocities is a fractured and disputed terrain. In this article, we empirically explore the complex process of translating violent events that took place in Medellín during the 1980s and 1990s into collective memory. It examines the conflict between Medellín inhabitants’ (in)ability to overcome trauma and shape their collective identity and the power of global media representations, exemplified by popular TV shows such as Narcos, to impose their narratives and consequently shape the present nature of the city. Drawing on original empirical material, consisting of ethnographic observations and interviews with residents of Medellín, including victims of narco-violence, this paper examines processes of memory commodification and its consequences on the global recognition of victimhood.

The criminalization of migration-related acts, rather than simply strengthening state authority, also represents a risk of exposing legal legitimacy deficits. By drawing on juridical analysis of court judgements, legal documents, and case law, together with ethnographic observation in court and analysis of media coverage, the article argues for acknowledging the extra-legal aspects of criminalization. By employing the concept of legal consciousness, we bring attention to how bordering processes are challenged from below by using the courtroom to expose potential legitimacy deficits concerning crimmigration enforcement. The article shows how the courtroom is not merely a place for convictions but also a site for resistance and social mobilization: a platform that may give marginalized groups voice and visibility, invoking a complex picture of state power, involving the ability to use force as well as reluctance and ambivalence connected to the questionable legitimacy of criminalization strategies.

The Southern Mediterranean border has in the past decade become one of the most deeply contested political spaces in Europe and has been described as a site of the border spectacle. Drawing on textual and visual analysis of Twitter messages by two of the most prominent actors in the field, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, and the humanitarian and medical NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, the article examines the split nature of the Mediterranean border which is, among others, visible in radically different narratives about migrants’ journeys, border deaths and living conditions. The findings challenge previous scholarship about convergence of humanitarianism and policing. The two actors are waging a fierce media battle for moral authority, where they use widely diverging strategies of claiming authority, each of which carries a particular set of ethical dilemmas.

This chapter explores growth of a social and penal policy approach which favours expulsion rather than integration, and which disrupts the long-standing traditions of social inclusion and penal welfarism, which have been the central building blocks of Nordic exceptionalism. It outlines how, faced with prospects and realities of mass migration, Nordic societies are opting for policing, imprisonment, and the use of the penal system as the preferred mode of creating social order. The chapter examines the duality of Nordic welfare states. Like the Nordic countries, Dutch criminal justice policies have long been characterized as ‘tolerant’, lenient, and liberal: permissive towards many vices, foreigner-friendly, blessed with a mild penal climate, and perceived to be a beacon of moderation. Nordic countries have also dedicated considerable policing efforts and resources to migration and border policing. With nationalist parties gaining traction throughout Europe, not just in the Nordic countries, inhospitality and intolerance thereby seem to have become the dominant voice and the new normal.

This article considers the future of punishment in a world shaped by competing and reinforcing forces of globalization and nationalism. In it, we call for a wider conversation about the growing interdependence between criminal justice and migration control and of its implications for many of the key concepts and approaches within the field of punishment and society. We also draw attention to how the progressive destabilization of citizenship and the precarity of membership and belonging are inimically linked to increasingly potent exhortations of penal power that affect us all. As globalization and global mobility continue to accelerate, there has been a concomitant growth in border control methods that are separate to, yet increasingly integrated within, systems of punishment. Such developments, in which the criminal justice systems in many countries of the global north are put to work in managing migration, are shifting the reach, impact and nature of punishment. Yet, outside the field of border criminology, such developments remain largely absent from view (Aas, 2014; Aas and Bosworth, 2013; Barker, 2013b; Bosworth, 2017a; Kaufman, 2015; Barker, 2017b). Instead, studies of punishment and penality remain firmly anchored within the nation state and its penal institutional backbone (courts, prisons, probation services, etc.). Intrinsically connected to modernity and the nation state, much of the scholarship thus assumes a bounded national polity. In this article, we seek to update some of the central conversations in the field which have been structured around punishment and (late) modern society (Garland, 1990; 2001) and reorient them around the global. We take some of the central concepts which have defined the field of punishment and society and examine how they might be adjusted and rethought in the context of mass migration to capture the current transformation of penal power better. We also highlight the growing body of scholarship on how the global is situated in and transforming everyday penal practices in national and local settings.

This chapter considers how criminological interest in migration and crime has been taken up by critical scholars within an emerging part of the discipline known as ‘the criminology of mobility’. It also considers where has the criminology of mobility come from? In answering the question, the chapter identifies three interdependent lines of scholarly enquiry: criminological concern with identity; scholarship on mobility and the border; and research on the global migration control industry. It traces mobility in criminology, considering how this early work approached the study of migration and the shifting categories of migrant, citizen and non-citizen in order to understand the recent turn to mobility. The chapter examines how the border has come to be central in criminological work concerned with mobility. It argues that where is the criminology of mobility heading? To answer this question the chapter identifies silences in the criminology of mobility literature as well as some of its challenges.

Questions of criminal law and criminal justice are increasingly becoming international, overcoming the confines of traditional jurisdictional constraints. This chapter traces these developments in order to examine what relevance criminology has had and may hold for understanding contemporary global issues. It examines, among other things, the impact of global interconnectedness on the nature of state sovereignty, particularly in light of challenges such as international terrorism, irregular migration, and transnational organized crime. By doing so, the chapter does not simply chart a demise of the state, as is sometimes assumed within studies of globalization. Instead, it proposes a more subtle, analytical and imaginary disconnection between crime, penality, and the nation state. Finally, the chapter addresses the rise of international forms of justice, particularly those articulated through human rights regimes, as well as the emerging challenges to them.

tion by European member states and EU agencies co-exist with policies which directly and indirectly contribute to the precariousness of life? While the trends may appear paradoxical, incoherent and mutually contradictory, this article suggests that they should be understood as interrelated, and intends to do so by empirically examining ‘the work’ that the humanitarian discourse does in the policing of European borders. Concretely, it focuses on Frontex, the agency tasked with management of EU’s external borders. Based on interviews with Frontex officials and border guard officers, and on analysis of relevant policy documents and official reports, the article critically examines the growing presence and prominence of human rights and humanitarian ideals in border policing practices. It aims to describe and to understand what may come across as a discrepancy between the organization’s activities and its public self-presentation.

The article examines the progressive de-bounding of social risks and the blurring boundaries between internal and external notions of security. Contemporary forms of cross-border connectivity bring to our attention the renewed importance of analysing distance (physical, social and other) in criminology. Globalising processes significantly expand the scale and scope of social interaction, including violent conflict and crime control and security strategies, by offering social agents a possibility of acting from the point of ‘strategic globality’. The article outlines an emerging landscape of ‘security at a distance’, where previously local and national phenomena are transformed by new forms of transnational connectivity, risk and movement. It suggests that, through the emerging forms of globalism, criminal justice is plugging into trans-border circuits of circulation of people, forms of knowledge and social and political action, where, ultimately, crime control can become an export and war can be, metaphor...

The article explores the nature of surveillance and crime control as they enter the sphere of global governance. Taking the European Union (EU) as a point of departure, it examines the relationship between surveillance and sovereignty, and looks more broadly at the role that transnational surveillance and crime control play in constructing a particular type of globally divided polity. Transnational surveillance practices are increasingly addressing a public which is no longer defined exclusively as the citizenry of the nation state, nor are all European citizens entitled to the privileges of such citizenship. Through the notions of bona fide global citizens and ‘crimmigrant’ others the article details how the seeming universality of citizenship is punctuated by novel categories of globally included and excluded populations, thus revealing the inadequacy of the traditional liberal language of citizenship as the springboard for articulating a critical discourse of rights.

The globalizing world has been described as a `world in motion', permeated by transnational networks and flows of goods, capital, information and cultural symbols, as well as potentially risky individuals and substances. This article examines the implications of the various global mobilities for criminological theory, method and policy. The world of global networks and flows introduces new notions of social ordering and exclusion, as well as challenging the prevailing conceptions of society, community, culture and social belonging, while growing demands for control of global mobilities create a complex dynamics between the nation-state and the emerging `world risk society'.

The article suggests that surveillance of the body is gradually becoming a major source of identification, as well as a vital element of late-modern mechanisms of social exclusion. The increasing demand for technological verification of identity is a result of intricate connections between our notions of the self, order, efficiency and security. Behind the growing acceptance of these new technologies, such as biometric passports, biometric ID cards, drug testing, and DNA databases, are fears connected to those who may have a ‘stolen identity’, are unidentified, or ‘identity-less’, such as potentially fraudulent welfare recipients, ‘identity thieves’, terrorists, immigrants and asylum seekers. However, unlike Foucault's disciplinary power, the latest technologies no longer see the body as something that needs to be trained and disciplined, but rather as a source of unprecedented accuracy and precision. Bodies become ‘coded’ and function as ‘passwords’. This form of identification is particularly relevant since its mode of operation enables identification and denial of access at-a-distance, thus fitting perfectly into the contemporary modes of disembedded global governance.

Information technology is a cultural environment that requires its users to communicate within certain parameters. This article explores how contemporary penal knowledge has changed in order to be accepted as knowledge in the information society. Computers enable penal governance that is based on formatted communication, and relies on databases rather than on the expertise of individual decision-makers. The rules governing the database thus become central for the nature of knowledge and identity constitution. The database, as a cultural form, differs from the narrative. It is a collection of items without an internal development. The database classifies its objects and in the process gives them additional social identities. The vertical and horizontal fields that constitute the database tend to construct individual identities in highly caricatured yet immediately available form (Poster, 1990). The database identity is dispersed, highly abstract and de-contextualized. As such it is opposed to narrative identity as well as Foucault’s ‘descending individualization’. It will be suggested that the database can be seen as an example of power without narrative (Simon, 1995) and government-at-a-distance.

How unrestricted or restricted should judges be when deciding a sentence? To what extent should sentences be predetermined, or to what extent should judges be left with the right to decide a sentence in each individual case? Some legal systems, most notably in the United States, have chosen sentencing guidelines to control judicial discretion. However, another approach has been to use computer technology in the form of so‐called sentencing information systems (SIS). This article examines these developments and what possible influence they have had and could have in the Scandinavian, particularly in the Norwegian, context. Penal institutions today are adjusting to the demands of the information society. Does and could the fact that we are living in an increasingly technologically mediated world influence judicial decision‐making? The article argues that the use of technology is not simply a question of technological change, but is first and foremost a social and political phenomenon, related to the relatio...