Criminology in Europe

To be awarded the Young Criminologist Award took me by complete surprise and gave me childish joy this summer. The article took me almost three years to write, so that hard work occasionally pays off is just, well: swell. I had just begun my annual leave when I found out, which gave me a chance to pause, to hold it still—if only for a moment—and to consider what it meant to me, what it meant for me, to be seen and recognised—honoured even—by the European Society of Criminology.  

Some of this is obviously vanity, as awkward as that feels to write out, but there was also another set of feelings: feelings of relief, that I—as a young scholar in a most competitive of industries—am somehow on the right track, and that I belong, maybe, to this scholarly community of criminologists in this room. Nominations and awards matter to young scholars, not because they stand for yet another set of quantitative markers in this fight for tenure or research grants, but because they inspire confidence and a sense of collegial support for the work one does, for the research one is engaged with—and driven by—in this line of work that at times feels more like a line of living.

I therefore want to extend my sincere gratitude to the society at home in Oslo that nominated me, and from where I have my intellectual breeding: represented by my department head May-Len Skilbrei and my former PhD supervisor Katja Franko. It’s not a given to be nominated. I know that is a privilege. I am well aware that there is a plethora of young criminologists equally if not more deserving that I am. To nominate does take an effort of will, and exactly because I feel so thankful to Skilbrei and Franko, I would like to use this opportunity to call on us all to be better at nominating one another, making each other more visible, more included—especially those of us that stand out from the centre, the metropole, the norm, whether because of our gender, our ethnic identity, geographical location, or simply because of our engagement with criminological topics that somehow defy the mainstream.

And on that, I want to reiterate my thanks to Katja Franko, who, since I first began looking into international criminal justice from a criminological angle—now well over a decade ago—was a supervisor who urged me on and gave me the support I needed when, at that time, international criminal justice was certainly not a mainstream criminological topic. And for these reasons too, I am so truly honoured by the Award Committee Professors Kivivuori, Kalac, and Biljeveld, not only for instilling in me this recognition but for recognising international criminal justice too as an empirical research field relevant for criminology also at the national level. And for that, I am not only thankful, but also proud.

In the remainder of this essay, I therefore take the opportunity to describe and reflect on the trajectory of my intellectual inclinations, and their relationship to criminology and the study of penal power especially.

We usually think of the power to punish as regulating the relationship between the citizens on the one hand and the state on the other. I have incrementally become interested in the shifting conditions of this relationship under processes of globalisation. I am especially interested in what happens to this relationship and the social function of punishment when the international and global, rather than the national, is constructed as the site of crime, justice, and community. For example: What drives penal policy-making when there are no electoral votes to pursue? Who and what do we punish? And, not least, who is this ‘we’?

If I were to pinpoint my intellectual starting point for this line of inquiry, it would have to be the double influence of Nils Christie and his seminal article on ‘conflict as property’ with an extracurricular course in anthropology prior to my Master studies. I had come across an article on the consequences of well-meaning western exports—experts and expertise—to help Mozambique deal with the aftermaths of its civil war. Medical doctors and psychologists had arrived to help people deal with their physical and psychological wounds. However, the research (which I admittedly have not been able to recover) showed how the western experts and their ways of thinking and solving were anchored in a view of the world that neither resonated nor contributed much of value to survivors in Mozambique. As a student I wondered, was there a similar dynamic going on in criminal justice exports?

The insistence of my supervisors throughout the past decade, Katja Franko and Kristin B. Sandvik, on questioning the ‘where’ and ‘who’ of theory and—frankly, power—has since inspired me to engage with the plethora of scholarly work on the transnational travelling of ideas and people in position to purport them across the fields of development and humanitarianism, criminal justice and law. Much –albeit perhaps not enough—has also been written on the colonial tracks of penal power, and the body of work known as ‘Southern criminology’ is certainly and finally gaining ground within ‘mainstream’ criminological scholarship.

However, as I was about to choose a topic for my master thesis, now well over a decade ago, the newly established International Criminal Court, a global and permanent treaty-based court located in The Hague with jurisdiction over war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity had just intervened in its first ‘situation’. It had unsealed its first arrest warrants for five members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that had caused insufferable violence (alongside the Ugandan army) in the northern regions of Uganda and especially towards its Acholi population. Besides being morally outraged at the modes and continued profusion of violence that characterised the conflict (as is the privilege of distant onlookers), I was interested in whether the ICC—this well-intentioned international judicial intervention—would face similar problems of epistemic irrelevance as those described in Mozambique. After all, the type of justice offered by the ‘international community’ was built upon two philosophical traditions anchored in the Western view of the world: liberalism and legalism. The ICC offered justice in the form of individual criminal accountability for a humanitarian emergency that had lasted well over two decades. As it turned out, the ICC indictments became a major obstacle to achieving peace and security in the region, one of the reasons being that the LRA had no incentive to lay down arms and continue peace negotiations with the threat of arrests hanging over their heads. In the words of a contemporary observer, the situation in northern Uganda came to be ‘something of a battleground between those who have been promoting the immediate application of mechanisms of retributive justice, and those who feel that this particular way of pursuing justice substantially jeopardises the prospects of peace’ (Okello, 2007: 1).

When I explored the different conceptualisations of justice that characterised this ‘battleground’, the role of international human rights NGOs as carriers of discourses on justice emerged as a principal finding. Why were they so vocal and rigid in opposing amnesties for the violence committed, when amnesties were what was sought by Acholi civil society? Why were they so determined to ‘put an end to impunity’ when, from my perceptions of them elsewhere, they were of defending political prisoners and campaigning against torture and for the abolishment of the death penalty—issues more often associated with punitive restraint rather than promotion. I found that international human rights NGOs represented and promoted specific modes of thinking about justice and punishment, and a core objective of my later research has been concerned with ‘unpacking’ what these mentalities and sensibilities consist of. 

In a book just published by the Clarendon Studies in Criminology by Oxford University Press, I explore how the role of international human rights NGOs in international criminal justice yields empirical insight into the meaning of punishment at the global level of analysis. This overarching objective has been guided by way of three separate yet interrelated sets of analytic questions: (i) What are the roles of NGOs in international criminal justice? (ii) What characterises punishment ‘gone global’? (iii) How is international criminal justice constituted by and of ‘the global’? The analysis is based on multi-sited ethnography, including interviews with key players in The Hague (and other places in the Netherlands) and in Uganda as well as Belgium, Norway, Rwanda and the UK. By analysing how international criminal justice is arranged spatially, and as such expresses social, political, and cultural relations of power, the book intends to show how international criminal justice is situated in particular spaces, networks, and actors, and how these structures the imaginations of justice circulating in the field. With clear global asymmetries emerging from that research, my aim is to provide descriptive as well as explanatory understandings of criminal punishment 'gone global', analysing its social causation while examining its cultural meanings, particularly as regards its role as an expression of 'the international' will to punish. To whom is it meaningful, and why?

International NGOs fulfil a number of functions at the international level that, arguably, would be inconceivable within Western systems of criminal justice. In addition to their ‘traditional’ roles of advocacy and agenda-setting, they identify and represent victims to the Court; they provide evidence and amicus curiae briefs, and draft penal codes and lobby for their implementation in domestic systems of criminal justice, to name just a few examples. Yet more than mapping the extent of their activities, the book explores the role of international human rights NGOs as part of the materialities and imaginaries of international criminal justice. Applying a sociology of punishment perspective, the book, for example, compares the 'penal imaginations' of domestic and international criminal justice, and considers the particularly central role of victims as a universalised symbol of humanity for the legitimacy of international criminal justice. It argues that international criminal justice reinforces a social imaginary of cosmopolitan solidarity embodied in the notion of humanity, but critically questions the social and political foundations of this imagainary, and its consequences for the pursuit of justice in response to global violence.

In the article ‘Penal humanitarianism beyond the nation state’, published in Theoretical Criminology and for which I won the ESC Young Criminologist Award, I analytically developthe legitimating role of humanitarianism for international criminal justice particularly, and for the export of penal power beyond the nation state more generally. It connects with previous scholarship on the expansion of penal power, such as Stanley Cohen’s (1985) Visions of Social Control, where he describes the notion of ‘net widening’ to illustrate how the criminal justice system spreads through community-based social control mechanisms, frequently enforced in the name of the good, and as a more social, humanitarian form of assistance than the criminal justice system situated at the core of state power. Aas (2011: 407) brings Cohen’s vision into the transnational area, asking whether criminology is ‘in danger of re-entering the complex and paradoxical terrain defined by terms such as “reform”, “progress”, “doing good”, “benevolence” and “humanitarianism”, only this time on the transnational level?’ As I argue in my article, the associations between punishment and humanitarianism are not only prominent in a globalising context but appear particularly strong when punishment is disembedded from the nation state framework altogether. Indeed, the connections between criminal justice and humanitarianism have become so blurred in the field of international criminal justice that NGO informants were often startled by my questions on the ICC as a penal institution. There, humanitarianism disguises the penal nature of international criminal justice.

International criminal justice upsets the truism in much of criminological and political thought that the power to punish remains in the nation state. By having a supranational criminal court that can punish individuals—including state leaders—for transgressions against core international crimes, the ICC has intervened in the relationship of vertical penal power between state and citizen. In a new research project, I am interested in how penal power similarly disembeds from its associations with national justice to inform the social relation between states; frankly, the role of penal power in international politics. Specifically, I am interested in Nordic penality, and how its penal exports must not only be seen as part of this penality, but also how humanitarianism here too facilitates the expansion of penal power beyond the nation state.

For example, what does it mean when Norway’s former minister for Foreign Affairs refers to Norwegian justice personnel as ‘good Norwegian export goods’? The so-called phenomenon and scholarly debate on ‘Nordic penal exceptionalism’ (NPE)—low imprisonment rates and ‘humane’ prison conditions as compared with other liberal democracies—presuppose a distinctive set of cultural values fostered by the social democratic welfare state regimes of the Nordic states (Pratt and Eriksson, 2014). However, the conceptual pairing of Nordic penality with welfarism reflects an idealised image of the relation between state and citizen. To explain the power to punish with the aim of including and rehabilitating citizens gives but a partial view of the actors, discourses, policies, and practices that motivate the power to punish under the global condition. Analysis of criminalisation processes at the global level emphasise the significance of transnational power networks, such as human rights organisations, lawyers, and police networks (Christensen and Levi, 2017). Moreover, the nation-state is under strain. Triggered by (threats of) migration flows, the penal welfare state is demarcating ‘inwards’ as punishment takes on a ‘bordered nature’ (Aas, 2014), with an inclusive approach to rehabilitation reserved citizens of the nation-state in contrast to the ‘criminal foreigner’ who is punished and expelled (Ugelvik, 2017). However, there is also expansion ‘outwards’, and which is much less explored: Up until last year, Norway rented prisons cells from The Netherlands, transferring prisoners and jurisdiction alike into foreign state territory (Pakes and Holt, 2015). At present, Sweden is spearheading a European initiative to create an international court in Syria to enable prosecution of so-called foreign fighters and European nationals at-a-distance, suggestion a further disconnection between crime, punishment, and the nation-state (Bosworth et al., 2018).

In these new projects, I thus want to displace the understanding of ‘Nordic penal exceptionalism’. And the way that I want to do that is to drag it out from the comfort of its own place within the nation-state, from the comfort of its place as concerning the relation between citizen and the Nordic penal state. Rather, I want to talk about NPE as a politics of promotion, as a politics of positioning, as a politics of branding, even, the Nordics as particularly ‘good punishers’—both by competence and virtue—and thus, of particular value for international export. By connecting the internal and external logics of the state, the aim of these new projects is to offer a fuller understanding of penality and how the penal state may be shifting.

In short, I hope to be able to continue to pursue my intellectual inclinations, now more firmly concerned with transnationalising the sociology of punishment. As we are reminded by David Garland, punishment should always raise awkward questions of legitimacy—and perhaps even more so when it is applied to external subjects that at least in theory are outside the limits of the state social contract. As demonstrated by my analysis of international criminal justice, penal humanitarianism disguises penal power, which—at least for me—has given pause for thought.

Kjersti Lohne is a Researcher at the Department of Criminology and the Sociology of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo, in Oslo, Norway

Christie, N. (1977). “Conflicts as property.” British Journal of Criminology 17(1): 1.
Carrington, K., H. Russell , and M. Sozzo. “Southern Criminology.” The British Journal of Criminology 56.1 (2016): 1–20.
Okello, M. (2007). The false polarisation of peace and justice in Uganda. Paper delivered at the International Conference on Peace and Justice.Lohne, K. (2019). Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice. Oxford University Press.
Lohne, K. (2018). “Penal humanitarianism beyond the nation state: an analysis of international criminal justice.” Theoretical Criminology, online first.
Cohen, S. (1985). Visions of social control: Crime, punishment, and classification. Cambridge, polity.
Aas, K. F. (2011). Visions of Global Control: Cosmopolitan aspirations in a world of friction. What is Criminology? C. Hoyle and M. bosworth. oxford university press.
pratt, J. and a. eriksson (2014). Contrasts in punishment: An explanation of Anglophone excess and Nordic exceptionalism, Routledge.
Christensen, M. J. and r. Levi (2017). International Practices of Criminal Justice: Social and Legal Perspectives, Routledge.
Aas, K. F. (2014). “Bordered penality: precarious membership and abnormal justice.” Punishment & Society 16(5): 520–541.
Ugelvik, T. (2017). The Limits of the welfare state? foreign national prisoners in the norwegian Crimmigration prison. In Scandinavian Penal History, Culture and Prison Practice, Springer: 405–423.
Pakes, Francis, and Katrine Holt (2015). “The transnational prisoner: exploring themes and trends involving a prison deal with the Netherlands and Norway.” British Journal of Criminology 57.1: 79–93.
Bosworth, M., et al. (2018). “Punishment, globalization and migration control: ‘Get them the hell out of here’.” Punishment & Society 20(1): 34–53.
Garland D (1990a) Frameworks of inquiry in the sociology of punishment. British Journal of Sociology 41: 1–15