In this paper, we ask how Finnish border guards present and legitimize profiling practices in border checks at the external Schengen border. Through a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with border guards and observation of their basic training, we demonstrate how a pervasive nationalized ideal of legalism, coupled with the formulation of the ban on ethnic profiling in Finnish legislation, allows for a narrow definition of ethnic profiling and for subsequently presenting the ban as irrelevant to policing in border checks. Legalism historically has a strong role in the Finnish national narrative, which builds on self-perceptions of an egalitarian and ‘good’ welfare state without a colonial past. We demonstrate through this example how legalism gains a central role in the logics of the ‘racial welfare state’ by legitimizing racialized structures of policing and making the multi-faceted realities of human conduct difficult to openly address.
How is justice experienced beyond formal legal processes? Socio-legal scholarship on institutional child abuse has concentrated on state responses – inquiries, apologies and redress – while cultural practices that sustain recognition after these conclude have received less attention. Where museums have been examined, the focus has been on state-led initiatives and public memory rather than on how those whose histories they commemorate evaluate them. This article takes up this question through the Australian Orphanage Museum, a memory project founded and run by Care-leavers. Drawing on interviews and focus groups, it situates survivor-led commemoration within victim-centred scholarship that conceptualises justice as evaluative, relational and socially situated. It argues that when authored and governed by those directly affected, museums function as dignity-affirming sites of non-legal justice. Rather than delivering a finite outcome, they endure as sites through which justice is continually evaluated, and authority over the public narration of institutional harm reconfigured.
This article examines the prosecution of photojournalist Abdurrahman Gök, who photographed the police killing of Kemal Kurkut in Diyarbakır on 21 March 2017. Gök was later arrested and charged under Turkey’s Anti-Terror Law (TMK) with ‘making propaganda for a terrorist organisation’. Drawing on fiili meçhul (‘unknown acts’), a phrase coined by Gök’s defence attorney during the trial, I develop meçhullük (‘unknowability’) as an analytic framework for understanding how anti-terror prosecutions criminalise the documentation of state violence while redeeming that violence–legitimating and obscuring it–through securitisation discourse. This process is rooted in the Turkish state’s long-standing criminalisation of Kurdish ethnic and political expression. Through interviews with Gök and his defence attorney, Resul Temur, courtroom observation, and visual-semiotic and discourse analysis, I show how meçhullük transfers guilt from perpetrators to witnesses, while also tracing how this legal unknowability is contested through the photographic evidence of Kurkut’s killing.
In Australia, despite the best efforts of a robust animal protection movement, substantive law reform has remained elusive. This article explores the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu's work by examining Australia's animal protection framework as a ‘field’. Applying Bourdieu, I argue that, within animal protection as a regulatory field, the welfare–cruelty opposition constitutes a form of ‘symbolic violence’. For intensive animal farming industries, this status began to manifest from the 1970s onwards, when these industries began to operate under Codes of Practice. The introduction of Codes of Practice also marginalised ‘animal cruelty’ as an offence relevant only to defendants estranged from the economy proper. The analysis has implications for how we think about law reform and animal protection advocacy, animal cruelty and animal welfare. It highlights the value of reflexivity and presents a unique perspective on social change that has relevance for a range of contemporary social justice issues.
European court decisions confirming Belgian bans on religious slaughter have been analysed primarily as clash between animal welfare and religious freedom. This article proposes a different reading that considers these bans as sites for constituting the ‘humane and civilised subject’ at the intersection of race, religion and species difference. It first situates contemporary bans within animal welfare legislation's longer history. It traces how race, religion and species difference have shaped understandings of non-human animal harm and suffering, including in relation to Muslim and Jewish slaughter practices. Moving on to contemporary case law, the article explores how notions of difference continue to operate in the reasoning of European Courts in ways that scrutinise minority practices while protecting majoritarian practices from critical examination. It argues that the decisions position observant Jews and Muslims outside ‘contemporary European public morals’. Moreover, these decisions perpetuate animal welfare law's speciesist logic, reinforcing non-human animals’ inferior status rather than substantially alleviating their suffering.
This socio-legal research contextualises the relationship between LGBTQ+ individuals in Poland and the law, focusing on how legal protections, or lack thereof, shape their everyday realities. Using a grounded theory approach based on 34 semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ+ Poles, the study expands Marc Hertogh's concept of legal alienation by introducing the notion of structural legal alienation . This new framework positions legal alienation not merely as a subjective experience, but as a condition imposed by the state. Through analysis of LGBTQ+ Polish legal consciousness, we find their experiences of structural legal alienation give rise to two pathways. The first is legal mobilisation, in which individuals continue to fight for legal recognition, motivated by a pragmatic understanding of the law's tangible impact on their everyday lives. The second involves seeking enfranchisement beyond the formal legal sphere, rooted in the belief that legal reform alone is insufficient, as the law is perceived to be deeply embedded within broader social and cultural structures. Our findings suggest that these two pathways, mobilising both within and beyond the law, are deeply interconnected, as many understood the social and cultural change to be essential for ensuring the implementation and effectiveness of any legal victories.
This article develops the concept of collaborative displacement to explain how legal intervention and private social mobilisation interact to produce spatial exclusion during periods of security crisis. Drawing on Critical Legal Geography and Critical Legal Studies, it argues that emergency legal measures may generate exclusionary consequences extending beyond formal legal sanction by legitimising suspicion, facilitating social mobilisation, and diffusing responsibility across public and private actors. The analysis centres on the case of Dr Dalal Abu Amneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel whose arrest following a social media post after the 7 October 2023 attacks was followed by sustained harassment that ultimately forced her family to leave their home. Rather than resulting from a single legal decision, displacement emerged through the cumulative interaction of legal enforcement, public exposure, institutional practices, and informal pressure. The article introduces collaborative displacement as a socio-legal framework for analysing how democratic legal systems may reshape urban belonging and minority presence under conditions of crisis.
After a century of inertia, Canadian courtrooms have undergone rapid transformation for the past 6 years. The move toward digital and hybrid proceedings has exposed the deep spatial and temporal structures on which courts rely, while also reshaping how participants access justice. For people experiencing homelessness, long-standing challenges navigating the court system have intensified during this period of technological change. We argue that while modernization efforts and workarounds offered by outreach workers can temporarily mitigbut ate some obstacles, they do not fundamentally alter the conditions that render the court system inaccessible to unhoused people. Drawing on interviews with 18 professionals who assist unhoused people through the court process, we use a chronotopic analysis to examine how court and street spacetime intersect in court proceedings, shaping legal participation. We show how spatio-temporal exclusions persist, and are in some cases reproduced, within hybrid court settings.
The United Nations has long positioned itself as a global leader in ending gender-based violence. However, its peacekeeping missions have been repeatedly implicated in sexual exploitation and abuse against the very populations they were deployed to protect. Using the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study, this paper argues that peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse are not isolated acts of misconduct but reflect deeper structures of inequality. It examines the blurred boundaries between security and humanitarianism in conflict zones, arguing that peacekeeping missions also function as political sites of power where women are positioned as paradoxical subjects of both protection and violation. Drawing on critical race theory, this paper also highlights how survivors are positioned as hyper-visible objects of exploitation but invisible as victims, demonstrating how systems intended to protect actively reproduces harm. It calls for accountability frameworks that move beyond performative compliance to strengthening survivors’ access to justice.
