Work

Introduction—Reckoning with the East: Situating scholarship from Eastern Europe and Eurasia in criminology and socio-legal studies

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: In July 2022, the Law and Society Association met in Lisbon to reckon with colonialism. Russia had launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine five months earlier, yet the war was barely mentioned. This introduction takes that silence as its starting point. It describes how a 2024 workshop in Oñati brought together scholars from Eastern Europe and Eurasia to ask whether frameworks built elsewhere can explain socio-legal dynamics there. We outline the Global East concept and the critiques contributors made of it. We summarize the articles and a Latin American commentary. Three themes recur. Positions of colonizer and colonized are unstable. The effects of imperial and state-socialist legacies depend on how they are activated. States perform legitimacy or compliance for audiences that reflect their place in the world economy. We conclude that the Global East is best understood as a problem space that extends southern criminology to nested and reversible relations of domination.

Source: Oñati Socio-legal Series

DOI: 10.35295/osls.iisl.2978

Authors: Gavin Slade, Laura Piacentini

Institutions: Nazarbayev University, University of Strathclyde

Language: Portuguese

Topic: Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies

Subfield: Anthropology

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica de Oñati