Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University

25/08/2026

The Sociology of Law Department leads a €1.86 million project studying Europe’s changing ties with Central Asia.

"FILTER: Filtering Governance of Mobility, Connectivity and Regulation in EU–Central Asia Relations" is a four-year Horizon Europe project that brings together 27 academic and non-academic organisations from Europe and Central Asia. They will examine three areas that are often studied separately: migration and labour mobility; transport and connectivity infrastructures; and regulatory governance.

The project comes at a time when Central Asia is becoming increasingly important for European connectivity, supply chains and access to critical resources. By studying migration, infrastructure and regulation together, the researchers aim to understand not only the formal objectives of EU policies, but also how these policies affect different groups and organisations in practice.

“Central Asia is an important setting for the research because several of these developments are happening at the same time,” says Project Leader Sherzod Eraliev, a researcher at the Sociology of Law Department.

“The region sits at the intersection of new transport and trade routes, competing geopolitical interests and significant labour migration. FILTER will investigate how EU policies are implemented and negotiated on the ground, as well as how they are contested by different actors."

The project is designed around international exchange spanning 16 countries in Europe and Central Asia, as well as Japan. The global network enables researchers to examine the evolving relationship between Europe and Central Asia from diverse disciplinary and institutional perspectives. The participants will spend time at partner institutions in different countries, combining research visits with joint fieldwork and collaboration.

The project has been awarded €1.86 million through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Staff Exchanges under the Horizon Europe programme.

24/06/2026

Timur Dadabaev gave a keynote presentation at the Central Eurasian Studies Society's (CESS) regional conference last week, hosted at the Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Dadabaev spoke on the topic "Quiet Power, Strategic Silence, Decolonial Diplomacy, and Transformative Resilience in Central Asia". The presentation touched on themes in his most recent book, "Strategic Silences and Narrative Power in International Relations: Ambiguity and Non-verbal Diplomacy in Reframing Central Asian Agency", published by Routledge earlier this month.

See Professor Dadabaev’s keynote presentation in full on CESS’s YouTube channel:

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23/06/2026

Professor Anna Lundberg, together with the Malmö Theatre Academy, will receive 150,000 SEK (~15,000 EUR) as part of an effort to implement Lund University’s strategy for cultural collaboration. The project ”Berättelser för framtiden. Målningsverkstäder och communityteater” (“Stories for the Future: Painting Workshops and Community Theater”).

Lundberg's project is one of three selected to receive seed funding from Lund University. It is part of a strategy for cultural collaboration 2018–2026, aiming to strengthen education, research, innovation, and collaboration through the significance of culture and the arts. The strategy includes, among other things, supporting activities that highlight and integrate culture and the arts into the university’s education, teaching, and research.

08/06/2026

A new book on Central Eurasian migration explores paths beyond the traditional routes.

The conventional understanding of Central Asian migration focuses on labour mobility toward Russia. The new anthology "Bridges Across Borders: Dynamics of Central Eurasian Migration to Australia, Japan, and Northern Europe" challenges this notion by showing a diversification of migration routes linking Central Eurasia with Northern Europe, Japan, Australia, Turkey, and other parts of the world.

The Sociology of Law Department's Guest Professor, Timur DADABAEV, has co-edited the volume, which features chapters by our researchers Rustam Urinboyev and Sherzod Eraliev. Through interdisciplinary studies, the book's authors explore labour migration, student mobility, diaspora communities, gender, digital activism, and the circulation of ideas and social practices across borders.

The book connects to the Sociology of Law Department's research agenda, covering migration governance, legal vulnerability, welfare systems, and the interaction between formal institutions and everyday lived experiences.

For Professor Dadabaev, the volume forms part of a broader research agenda examining mobility, transnational networks, and social transformation across Central Eurasia. He shares the editorship with Professor Shigeto Sonoda (The University of Tokyo) and Professor Kirill Nourzhanov (The Australian National University).

Read and download "Bridges Across Borders: Dynamics of Central Eurasian Migration to Australia, Japan, and Northern Europe" from Springer Nature's website:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-95-4867-5

27/05/2026

The Sociology of Law Department is pleased to share the publication of a new book by Guest Professor Timur Dadabaev and the University of Tokyo’s specially appointed professor Shigeto Sonoda: “Strategic Silences and Narrative Power in International Relations: Ambiguity and Non-verbal Diplomacy in Reframing Central Asian Agency”, published by Routledge.

The authors explore how silence, ambiguity, omission, and non-verbal practices function as absences in political communication and as meaningful social and diplomatic strategies that shape international relations and regional agency in Central Asia.

Bringing together newly written chapters alongside substantially revisited earlier research, Dadabaev and Sonoda engages with broader questions highly relevant to sociology of law and socio-legal studies: how power operates through narratives, institutional language, selective visibility, and strategic non-articulation; how actors navigate asymmetric geopolitical environments; and how legal, political, and social orders are shaped not only by what is formally stated, but also by what remains deliberately unsaid.

The publication reflects the department’s continuing engagement with interdisciplinary research on governance, law, power, migration, regional transformation, and global inequalities.

More information about the book is available at Taylor & Francis's website: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003681236/strategic-silences-narrative-power-international-relations-timur-dadabaev-shigeto-sonoda

27/05/2026

We are happy to announce that Sophia Zisakou is our most recent Doctor of Sociology of Law!

On Monday, May 25, her thesis, “Feeling Q***r, Feeling Real: Affective Economies of Truth in Q***r Asylum Politics”, was unanimously approved by the examining committee after an almost three-hour-long defence.

Sophia Zisakou has studied what makes q***rness credible or incredible in the Greek asylum system. To be granted asylum, q***r asylum seekers must prove to migration authorities that they are q***r or risk deportation. Zisakou focuses on the role of emotions in this process, which racialise and exclude, but also create spaces for credible stories to be told, performed, and become audible.

Based on encounters with decision-makers, lawyers, asylum seekers, and refugees, she discusses the interplay of emotions and q***rness as both exclusionary and border-making, as well as transformative and contestatory of exclusions. Delving into the affective politics of truth through an analysis of her interlocutors’ accounts, she outlines the dichotomies of progress and backwardness, emotion and reason, genuineness and bogusness, and the private and the public that dominate decision-making and justify exclusions.

The opponent, Professor Jack Halberstam of Columbia University, noted that throughout the thesis, Zisakou refuses the quest for sexual truth, which is the purpose of the interviews and asylum process. Instead, she identifies that it is a brutal and racist mechanism of exclusion in which colonialism thrives.

“This is a tremendous piece of work, and I hope it gets read widely,” Halberstam said.

Download “Feeling Q***r, Feeling Real: Affective Economies of Truth in Q***r Asylum Politics” in the Lund University Research Portal:
https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/feeling-q***r-feeling-real-affective-economies-of-truth-in-q***r--2/

22/05/2026

Congratulations, “Dottore” Carlo Nicoli Aldini, on a successful thesis defence!

"It is an unusually good read," said the external reviewer, Professor Siri Gloppen of the University of Bergen, about Nicoli Aldini’s dissertation “Legal and Lethal: Lawfare and Legal Mobilization in the Conflict over the Steel Plant of Taranto, Italy”. "It is theoretically ambitious, intellectually rigorous, and it is a page turner. It makes significant contributions to socio-legal scholarship and legal mobilisation studies."

This thesis examines the long-running conflict around the Ilva steel plant in the Southern Italian city of Taranto. Since the 1960s, the plant has driven economic growth while also causing severe pollution, with serious consequences for public health.

The study shows how this conflict has been fought both on the streets and through the courts. While the Italian government has used legal tools to protect economic interests tied to the plant, local communities and activists have engaged in sustained legal mobilisation, bringing cases in domestic and European courts to demand environmental protection and accountability. These efforts have led to important legal victories, even if their impact has often been limited or rolled back.

By analysing this struggle, the thesis highlights how law can be both a tool for change and a mechanism of control. It introduces new ways of understanding “lawfare” and offers a nuanced view of the possibilities—and limits—of using legal systems to drive social change.

A timely and thought-provoking contribution on the relationship between law, power, justice, and pecorino cheese.

Read and download it in Lund University's Research Portal: https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/legal-and-lethal-lawfare-and-legal-mobilization-in-the-conflict-o/

01/04/2026

We have reason to celebrate at the Sociology of Law Department!

On March 25, the Grant Management Services of the European Commission notified Rustam Urinboyev that we will receive €5 million in funding for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Programme on Post-Imperial Islamic Legal Cultures (i.e., Islam, secularism and democracy). This programme will fund the recruitment of 15 PhD students. Four of these will be hired at the Sociology of Law Department.

Stay tuned for more information about the doctoral network “A Sociology of Post-Imperial Islamic Legal Cultures: Insights from Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia” and its associated doctoral student positions.

16/03/2026

The project “Preparing for the Unprecedented: Enabling local knowledges for effective adaptation in the Amazon” is hiring a postdoctoral researcher.

The project aims to identify legal, policy, and knowledge-based frameworks that empower indigenous peoples and local communities to adapt to climate stress in ways that preserve their cultural and environmental heritage while enhancing their well-being and autonomy.

The postdoctoral researcher will:
▪️Contribute to the theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary study of adaptation to climate change in the Amazon.
▪️Carry out extensive fieldwork and other related duties chiefly in the Colombian Amazon region and neighbouring Amazonian countries.
▪️Contribute to publishing findings, participating in workshops, and presenting at international conferences.

The position is planned to start on 1 September 2026. Applicants must have a PhD degree in the social sciences and have an excellent command of Spanish and English to conduct interviews, fieldwork, and community-based research in Spanish-speaking contexts.

Learn more about the position and how to apply in Lund University’s Recruitment Portal: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:913098/

06/02/2026

A warm welcome to the Sociology of Law Department, Victoria Canning, who joins us at 20 percent for two years as a Visiting Professor.

Canning is a Professor of Criminology at Lancaster University, researching border harms and zemiology, torture, and sexualised violence. Additionally, she is the Head of the Harm, Crime and Criminalisation Research Centre, and Associate Director of Border Criminologies at Oxford University. Professor Canning has published seven books as author or editor and was the winner of the 2018 British Society of Criminology Book Prize.

Why did you choose Lund University?

"Lund University – and specifically the Department of Sociology of Law – has been such an important influence for me in its real-world impact and approaches to disrupting disciplinary norms. I have visited on numerous occasions and was lucky enough to have been inspired by Reza Banakar, whose vision for a defined space for a sociology of law has been carried on by contemporary colleagues."

How do you describe your current research?

"For almost 20 years, I have been researching border harms and responses to migrant survivors of violence and torture. My current research – Supporting Survival - moves the findings and theories from these projects into positive practice. Through collaborative toolkit development with NGOs and grassroot organisations, survivor and practitioner knowledge and expertise is more easily accessible."

What will be your main research focus during your time at Lund University?

"I see this as an opportunity to collectively build ways with Lund University colleagues to move research knowledge into practice and critical pedagogy. I’m excited to introduce the Supporting Survival toolkit and R2R Asylum Navigation Board to the department and hope to develop projects where similar approaches can be take,n working across the multitude of research expertise in the department."