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Trial lecture - time and place
Adjudication committee
- Professor May-Len Skilbrei, University of Oslo (leader)
- Associate professor Deirdre Conlon, University of Leeds (1. opponent)
- Professor Rene van Swaaningen, Erasmus University of Rotterdam (2. opponent)
Chair of defence
- Vice dean Vibeke Blaker Strand
Supervisors
- Professor Katja Franko
- Professor Thomas Ugelvik
Summary
Membership, welfare, and penal order in the Nordic region
The surge of penal populism and the punishment directed at non-citizens reflect ongoing debates about Norwegian and Danish values, membership, and the limits of the welfare state. The ongoing entanglement of immigration and criminal law and the resulting differentiation in the criminal justice system are destabilizing the ordinary framing of justice and punishment. Simply put, border controls are transforming penal power. When used against non-citizens, penal power becomes more openly exclusionary: it leads to closed detention centers, penal institutions exclusively for non-citizens, and a deportation regime. This dissertation focuses on non-citizen women’s experiences in relation to this type of differentiated, more exclusionary (or bordered) punishment in Norway and Denmark.
The dissertation examines some of the tensions around citizenship, punishment, and welfare by drawing on extensive empirical research conducted with non-citizen women made deportable through illegalization or incarceration in Denmark and Norway, thus making several key contributions. It demonstrates the role of citizenship status in (re)producing inequality in and beyond penal contexts, and highlights the gendered harms produced by incarceration and deportation; it draws attention to reach of penal logics, optics and practices beyond the prison wall; it shows how the purpose, nature, and experience of punishment are being altered, in the case of non-citizens, but, also how non-citizen women circumvent bordered punishment; and it points to variation in penal policy and practice in the Nordic region, challenging notions of the Nordics as ‘good punishers’.
Citizenship as a structural inequality
The dissertation puts a spotlight on how citizenship status (and the ‘illegality’ and ‘deportability’ derived from it) is intimately connected with the use of penal power playing a central role in the co-constitution of gendered, classed, and racialized inequalities in Denmark and Norway. Citizenship in intersection with other inequalities informs non-citizen women’s experience of incarceration, the enjoyment of human rights, and life trajectories. This dissertation also emphasizes the importance of citizenship status, more broadly, as a mechanism for awarding global privilege that ought to be taken into account in intersectional analyses of racialized, gendered, and classed inequalities.
Bordered and gendered punishment
One of the project’s important contributions is shedding light on how bordered punishment is also gendered. The findings show that citizenship status in intersection with gender significantly affects the experience of punishment and women’s life trajectories. The dissertation shows that differentiation due to citizenship status is being (re)produced and (re)enforced through penal power and often results in gendered harm. Bordered punishment produces liminality, marginality, and exclusion and may lead to gendered exploitation, abuse, or violence. The logic of bordered punishment is contested not least by non-citizen women as going against the fundamental principles of equality and women’s right to protection.
A way forward
Citizenship has always been a disputed category, open to question, and ultimately susceptible to change. Currently, formal citizenship (and the privileges deriving from it) is intimately connected with state sovereignty and the use of penal power, and it is one of the most guarded socio-economic distinctions in the global order. Suffering produced by deportation and in penal institutions specifically designed to hold non-citizens is political in nature; if it is to be solved, it can only be solved politically, through putting an end to non-citizens’ only prisons and deportation. This dissertation was written in the hope that recognizing how social disadvantage intersects with legal categories may pave the way to the destabilization of socio-legal regimes that, presently, appear immune to change.