5th International Conference on Punishment In The Global Peripheries
Call for Papers
We are very excited to share our call for papers for the 5TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PUNISHMENT IN THE GLOBAL PERIPHERIES in CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, 11-13 DECEMBER 2025. The deadline for submitting your abstracts is 15th April 2025.
In 2021, the first International Conference on ‘Punishment in Global Peripheries’ was held online in an attempt to challenge the Northern-centric approach that has dominated the literature on punishment and society. The conference was organised by the Centre of Criminology of the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the Crime and Society Program of the National University of Litoral (Argentina).
This initiative has been taken forward into an annual conference since then, held in Oxford, United Kingdom (2022); in Mumbai, India (2023); and in Santa Fe, Argentina (2024).
In 2025, the Fifth International Conference ‘Punishment in Global Peripheries’ will be held in Cape Town, South Africa. In doing so, we continue the practice of keeping the conference venue moving across the globe, hosting it on the African continent for the first time. The Centre of Criminology from the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and the ECRIM of the University of A Coruña (Spain) join the organisation as co-hosts alongside the two founding academic institutions.
We welcome contributions on punishment in peripheral contexts. We recognised the relative and complex borders as well as the diverse forms of being ‘peripheral’. We also consider that frontiers of ‘punishment’ are fluid. We are particularly interested in papers that engage with and explore the following topics:
- Past and present effects of imperialism and colonialism in penality, including the problematisation of theoretical tools to think about them.
- Travels of penal knowledges, policies and practices across core and peripheral contexts, and within peripheral contexts and regions.
- Complexities and peculiar features of penal trends, institutions, and practices in peripheral settings and explanations of them.
- Innovative methodological and theoretical perspectives to think peripheral penality.
Submit an abstract of up to 300 words and a one-paragraph biography by 15 April 2025 to punishmentperipheries@gmail.com. Also include your name, affiliation, email address, and whether you intend to participate in the conference in person or online. Please note that online participation will be limited and exclusively restricted to scholars based in academic institutions from peripheral contexts outside Africa, and will be no more than 20 % of the total number of papers. There is limited funding available for speakers’ accommodation, so please indicate whether you want to be considered for accommodation funding. Abstracts should be in Word format, and the filename should be the author’s surname. Acceptance will be communicated by 1 May 2025. Authors whose abstracts are accepted should submit their papers (6,000-8,000 words) by 1 October 2025.