About the publication
The study of Nordic criminal justice is usually studied via the notion of ‘Scandinavian penal exceptionalism’, which posits that punishment in Scandinavian states is relatively humane, due to their lower imprisonment rates and more decent prison conditions compared to those found in other liberal democracies (see Pratt and Eriksson, 2014). Although the exceptionalism thesis is highly contested (Barker, 2012; 2018) – not least from within Scandinavian criminology itself (Ugelvik and Dullum, 2011; Smith and Ugelvik, 2017) – no work displaces the penal exceptionalism thesis from its association with the Scandinavian welfare state to consider how it fares outside the national frame of justice.
In a new project entitled JustExports, funded by the Research Council of Norway’s Young Research Talents grant, I will examine how Scandinavian penal exceptionalism is put to work as a policy to promote the Scandinavian states as ‘penal humanitarians’ (see Bosworth 2017; Lohne 2020) of particular value for international export, and in this way to facilitate the travel of Scandinavian penal power beyond the confines of their territorial nation states.
By focusing explicitly on the state’s external penality, JustExports hope to advance criminological thinking on the penal state in a global world. Moreover, by detaching the notion of Scandinavian penal exceptionalism from its association with Scandinavian nation-state welfarism, JustExports will provide insight into the value of Scandinavian penal exceptionalism as, potentially, a policy to promote the Scandinavian states as particularly good punishers, which is advantageous for strategic positioning and status in international relations.
See more:
- Read the full blog post at the website of the Nordic Research Council for Criminology.