Public ombud institutions exist in many countries to address maladministration through complaints; however, sociological and empirical research remains limited, particularly outside the Global North. We address these gaps through two case studies of relatively new public ombuds: Sint Maarten (2010) and Northwest Territories, Canada (2018). We investigate the effects of transplanting a European legal institution into contexts where the relationship between citizens and the state bears the imprint of colonial governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with ombudspersons, staff and leading ombud proponents, we examine the ombuds’ challenges on the macro, meso and micro levels. Adopting a critical stance on legal transplants, we build on the legal irritants concept and the importance of ‘vernacularisation’. We find that despite the two institutions’ different trajectories, they face similar challenges in building institutional trust and sustaining legitimacy with government actors and the public related to legal transplantation and colonial legacies.
Albania's post-communist transition (1991-present) is often characterized as a case of incomplete or failed Transitional Justice (TJ). This article challenges that framing by reconceptualizing Albania's experience as one of deferred TJ, a condition in which unresolved accountability demands from the initial transition period are not extinguished but rather displaced onto subsequent institutional and normative processes, particularly those driven by Europeanisation. Through archival and legislative analysis, the article examines the selective enforcement of lustration, stalled property restitution, and the delayed opening of Sigurimi intelligence files decades later. Rather than linear failures, these represent a 'layered accumulation' of justice claims reactivated by EU conditionality and memory politics. The article proposes a tripartite analytical framework, temporal displacement, normative reconfiguration, and participatory deficit, to analyze how deferred justice operates in peripheral European states. The framework contributes to critical TJ scholarship by de-centering the dominant post-conflict paradigm and foregrounding the distinctive temporalities of post-authoritarian accountability in South-Eastern Europe.
The empirical authority of state-centered criminological knowledge often depends on the bureaucracies that decide which deaths are countable. This article conceptualizes bureaucracies of (Un)Knowing: institutional systems that organize ignorance while appearing to produce knowledge. Focusing on the omission of "femicide" from U.S. law and data, it examines how classification, measurement, and silence operate as technologies of governance. Through the U.S. case, it identifies three mechanisms-refusal, incorporation, and displacement-through which bureaucratic ignorance is institutionalized. The analysis builds from feminist, critical, decolonial, Southern, zemiological, and post-structural traditions that have long challenged the state's authority to define crime and harm, while showing how dominant administrative evidence can still reproduce state-produced erasures. Advancing a criminology of (Un)Knowing, the article treats absence not as deficit but as evidence of power. It argues that confronting these epistemic infrastructures is essential to reimagining what and who counts within criminological knowledge.
This article examines how migrant rights lawyers sustain legal advocacy when previously effective pathways to justice are systematically closed. Focusing on European migrant rights lawyering between 2015 and 2025, it investigates responses to the retrenchment of migrant protections at the European Court of Human Rights, where rights-expanding jurisprudence has increasingly given way to migration-control logics. Drawing on interviews with migrant rights lawyers and documentary analysis, we identify five recurring forms of impasse: adverse judicial rulings, procedural barriers, restrictive European Union asylum reforms, hostile political environments, and unstable funding conditions. The article develops the concept of “dead-end strategies” to describe legal approaches that emerge when traditional pathways to legal victory become structurally blocked. The findings reveal a shift away from precedent-focused litigation toward mitigation-oriented practices emphasizing sustained presence, community engagement, and long-term relationships with highly mobile clients. The article argues that existing theories of legal opportunity structures inadequately explain legal mobilization under conditions of systemic closure. By highlighting the generative potential of profound constraints, we show that shrinking legal opportunities can generate new forms of advocacy. Migrant rights lawyers increasingly reimagine their work as both a means of securing favorable judgments and a practice of remaining present when the doors of the law are closed.
Voluntary carbon markets promise to transform atmospheric mitigation into a tradeable form of climate governance, yet the legal structures enabling that transformation can also determine whose claims become recognisable and whose interests remain expendable. This article examines that tension through the concept of carbon necropolitics, asking how carbon-market law can facilitate dispossession while remaining formally compliant with climate governance standards. Drawing on critical doctrinal analysis of the Verified Carbon Standard, Gold Standard, ICVCM framework, and Article 6.4 mechanism, the article develops three connected concepts: atmospheric severance, through which sequestration value is detached from territorial authority; compliance necropolitics, through which FPIC procedures can convert structurally constrained participation into legally cognisable consent; and necro-legal subjectivity, through which communities become increasingly difficult to recognise once their carbon productivity is exhausted. The article argues that these mechanisms provide its legal form, rendering it tradeable, procedurally valid, and resistant to challenge.
