Authors

Laura Piacentini¹;  ¹ University of Strathclyde, UK

Discussion

In our major ESRC study: In the Gulag’s Shadow: Producing, Consuming and Perceiving Prisons in the Former USSR, we are concerned with the urgent question of what is the culture of penal punishment in two of the former USSR’s most punitive nations: Russia and Kazakhstan? Why is the former USSR absent from debates and theorisations on global punishment systems? What has the invasion of Ukraine delivered in terms of situating penal-politics in authoritarianism contexts? Criminology and Area Studies continue to either neglect, or partially engage with, the East in debates on the Global South and Global North. East is defined in this paper as including the former USSR. This status confusion creates a pronounced cleavage; a frame of coloniser versus colonised. Inevitably, this has erased a more fluid politics of representation, of contexture. This presentation explores what contexture might mean through situating the former USSR inside geo-political, carceral discourse. I argue that the former USSR is a subaltern Empire, hidden, absent and poorly theorised. It is not a place or a region but a relational context. My paper holds ideas that are in development, but my aim is to address the erasure of the East in global carceral studies by disrupting assumed categories of coloniser/colonised and, therefore, contesting current geo-politics of criminological knowledge.