The project titled ‘The Vulnerable State: Appraising the Ambivalent Economies of State Power’ explores the ambivalent and shifting governance of socially marginalised groups in the criminal and administrative justice domains. It hypothesises that the state’s treatment of these groups produces a dissonance between objectives of care and control, which reveals profound dilemmas in the exercise of state power in a globalised, unequal world. It empirically examines these moral and emotional dilemmas through the everyday work of frontline officers.

Methodologically, it reconceptualises the study of the state, from the bottom up. Conceptually, it advances a new theory of the state which places moral sentiments and emotions at the heart of its analysis.

It will assess the significance of acknowledging anew a humane side of the state, the resulting contradictions experienced by those who embody state authority on the ground, and the critical potential of humanitarianism for resisting punitiveness from within.

Drawing on a range of methodologies, the project will study the moral and affective economies of state power in two key institutions (criminal and administrative justice) in the governance of social marginality at the macrosocial level (through the analysis of law and policy, operational training and visual material) and microsocial level (through the analysis of institutional decision-making and practices, and individual perceptions and experiences).

The project is made of five distinct yet interconnected subprojects tracing laws and policies, and documenting the work of a range of institutional actors and agencies (the police, the prison, the immigration court, and asylum case-work and support).

Based at Warwick CJC, the research team will be formed by Aliverti, Carvalho and Chamberlen, two PhD students and a research assistant. It starts in October 2022 for four years.

CJC members Ana Aliverti, Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen along with Máximo Sozza, professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology and Director of the Program on Crime and Society at the National University of Litoral (Argentina) have published a new Article 'Decolonizing the Criminal Question' in Punishment and Society.

This article examines this debate surrounding the impact of colonialism in the past and present of institutions and practices of crime control, both at the central and peripheral contexts, as well as in the production of knowledge in the criminological field.

It offers a critical account of key themes and problems that emerge from the intimate relationship between colonialism and punishment that directly challenge the persistent neglect of these dimensions in mainstream criminological scholarship. The authors aim to foreground the relevance of this relationship to contemporary enquiries. They highlight that decolonization did not dismantle the colonial roots of the cultural, social and political mechanisms informing contemporary punishment. These colonial roots are still very much part of criminal justice practice and are thus also central to criminological knowledge productions.

For access to the article click here .

Two members of the Criminal Justice Centre Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen recently worked with colleagues from Brunel University London, University of Oxford and University of York on an expert report on COVID-19 and the criminal law which was submitted to the Parliamentary Justice Committee.

The written expert which these academics submitted can be viewed here: Expert evidence on COVID-19 and the criminal law .

The CJC hosting an international conference entitled 'Decolonising Criminal Justice and Penal Power: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems and Subaltern Perspectives'. We are encouraging submissions in line with the themes - please email an extended abstract of no more than 800 words to cjc@warwick.ac.uk by 15th March 2020.

Anastasia Chamberlen (Warwick Sociology) has been awarded the prestigious BSC Book Award for her book Embodying Punishment: Emotions, Identities and Lived Experiences in Women's Prisons.