Ana Aliverti
Professor
Policing; Criminal Law; Criminal Justice; Border Controls; Immigration; Citizenship; Criminology; Asylum Decision Making
School of Law
S2.26, Social Sciences Building
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom
024 765 28398
Office hours: on research leave
Ana's research lies at the intersection of criminology, socio-legal studies, sociology and anthropology. She specializes in criminal justice, policing and border controls, and is interested in questions of citizenship and belonging in criminal justice, the place of morality and affects in state power, and pluralized forms of security governance. She has conducted research on the asylum bureaucracy, criminal courts, the police, and immigration enforcement.
Ana is currently leading two research projects. The first, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, with Anastasia Chamberlen and Henrique Carvalho, explores the ambivalent emotional and affective economies of state power in the governance of social marginality. Through empirical and legal methodologies, it traces the conflicting logics, emotions, and affects in the treatment of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains.
The second project, funded by the British Academy (with Sabina Frederic, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes), investigates how young people in structurally disadvantaged urban communities navigate everyday insecurity within welfare retraction and intensified punitive policies. By combining theories of legal pluralism and extra-legal governance and using multi-sited ethnography, the project aims to advance a novel framework that rethinks security as relational, pluralised, and agentic.
She concluded a project on the policing of migration which investigated the growing cooperation between immigration enforcement and the police, and explores the new contours of law enforcement in the context of globalization. Its findings form part of the book 'Policing the Borders Within' (Oxford University Press, 2021). She also led a second project on border controls and humanitarianism, funded by the British Academy, with Elisa García España and Roberto Dufraix, which explored the conflicting demands of border work and the emotional and moral pains it creates on frontline staff in Dover (UK), Ceuta (Spain) and Colchane (Chile).
She is the co-editor of the books 'The Embodied State. Emotions, State Power, and Social Marginalisation' (Routledge, 2025) and 'Decolonising the Criminal Question: Rethinking the Legacies, Epistemologies and Geographies of Criminal Justice' (with Anastasia Chamberlen, Henrique Carvalho and Maximo Sozzo) (Oxford University Press, 2023). Ana is currently guest editing a special issue on 'The Global Webs of Counterinsurgency Policing' with Zoha Waseem and Conor O'Reilly, forthcoming in Security Dialogue, and co-editing a book with Maximo Sozzo and Sabina Frederic on 'Policing, Militarisation, and Authoritarianism in Latin America and Europe', forthcoming with Routledge.
Her research has been funded by the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Her book, 'Crimes of Mobility' (Routledge, 2013), was co-awarded the British Society of Criminology Best Book Prize for 2014 and her article 'Making People Criminal' was awarded the best article of the year in Theoretical Criminology (2012). She is the recipient of the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (BARSEA) (2015) and of the Philip Leverhulme Prize in Law (2017). Her article 'Benevolent Policing? Vulnerability and the Moral Pains of Border Controls’ published in the British Journal of Criminology won the 2020 Radzinowicz Prize. She has been awarded a visiting fellowship by Princeton University-Institute of Advanced Studies where she will be based in 2026-2027.