Legal Pluralism and Everyday Life in Multicultural Prisons: A Case Study of Central Asian Muslim Prisoners in the Russian Penal System

This is an application for a twelve-month sabbatical grant.

The home institution is the Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University and host institutions abroad are the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul and the Academy of the General Prosecutor’s Office of Uzbekistan.

The choice of these two host institutions is motivated by the applicant’s proposed project which requires archival research and the study of penal culture and history in the post-Soviet context.

The overall aim of the project is to conduct socio-legal research on legal pluralism and everyday life in multicultural prisons through the ethnographic study of Central Asian Muslim prisoners in the Russian penal system.

The main reason for focusing on Russia is that its penal system is marked by heavily punitive prison administration practices, ethnic and religious diversity, and the criminal subculture which has its origins in the Stalinist Gulag system. The project is very timely.

The ever-growing calls for penal reform that began in the last century did not produce expected outcomes, and the rate of incarceration continues to rise on a global scale.

An understanding of how prisoners’ identity and life trajectories are shaped by the legally plural environment is vital for our comprehension of penal law and ideologies.

The project results will lead to a book on Legal Pluralism, Informality and Everyday Life in the Multicultural Russian Prisons, which will be published by the University of California Press.