In 2026, the Sixth International Conference ‘Punishment in Global Peripheries’ will be held
in Astana, Kazakhstan. Continuing our commitment to moving the conference across the
globe (Oxford, United Kingdom, 2022; in Mumbai, India, 2023; in Santa Fe, Argentina,
2024; and Cape Town, South Africa, 2025), this will be the first time it takes place in Central
Asia. The area around Astana was an important site of Soviet convict settler colonialism, and
Kazakhstan today is a country experiencing dynamic processes of penal change. This year,
the School of Sciences and Humanities of Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) joins the
organisation as co-host alongside the other academic institutions involved.
We welcome contributions on punishment in peripheral contexts. We recognise the relative
and complex borders as well as the diverse forms of being ‘peripheral’ at a global scale in the
present day. We also consider that the frontiers of ‘punishment’ are fluid.
We are particularly interested in papers that engage with and explore the following topics:
- Past and present effects of imperialism and colonialism in penality, including critical
engagements with the theoretical tools used to analyse them; - Travels of penal knowledges, policies, and practices across core and peripheral
contexts, as well as within and between peripheral contexts and regions; - Complexities and peculiar features of penal trends, institutions, and practices in
peripheral settings, and explanations of these dynamics; - Innovative methodological and theoretical perspectives to think of peripheral penality.
