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.
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.
How can a legal principle abandoned by a court be politically re-authorised through legislation only a few years later? This article examines the German conflict over Tarifeinheit, the principle that only one collective agreement should apply within a workplace. Drawing on Bourdieu's field theory and Eyal's concept of spaces between fields, it conceptualises politicisation as boundary work through which juridical and political distinctions are reproduced, contested and reconfigured. Combining legal discourse analysis with policy-field analysis, the article reconstructs how Tarifeinheit was delegitimised within juridical discourse before being recast as a political response to occupational-union strikes in critical infrastructure. It argues that juridical intellectuals mobilised a historically sedimented legal repertoire, translated juridical authority into politically effective claims and assembled cross-field networks around statutory recodification. In doing so, the article shows how political-economic transformation can make a juridically delegitimised doctrine newly actionable as a legislative response.
Automated welfare systems increasingly rely on complex assemblages of algorithms, administrative rules, and forms of digital labor that remain legally and institutionally invisible. This article develops a sociolegal analysis of what it terms the “accountability gap:” the structural disjunction between formal legal responsibility and the practical conditions under which automated welfare decisions are produced, maintained, and contested. Using the Chilean sociolegal and institutional landscape as a crucial case study, the article conceptualizes “shadow digital labor” as a constitutive yet unacknowledged component of contemporary welfare governance. It illustrates how “digital-by-default” welfare architectures clash with new GDPR-inspired data protection frameworks (Law No. 21.719), producing an asymmetrical distribution of compliance risk. Rather than proposing a comprehensive theory of automation, the analysis offers a jurisprudential typology of “law in action” to examine how accountability is displaced across human and technical actors.
