Becoming a European prisoner: penal reforms and European belonging in Georgia and Estonia.

Over the past three decades many former Soviet states introduced reforms to the penal systems they inherited from socialist regimes. In most countries of the post-Soviet space, these reforms have been depicted by policy-makers as projects of 'Europeanization'. This article investigates the discursive construction of penal reform in Georgia and Estonia after these countries gained independence.

COVID-19 and European carcerality: Do national prison policies converge when faced with a pandemic?

The article analyses an original dataset on policies adopted in 47 European countries between December 2019 and June 2020 to prevent coronavirus from spreading to prisons, applying event-history analysis. We answer two questions: 1) Do European countries adopt similar policies when tackling the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons? 2) What factors are associated with prison policy convergence or divergence? We analyze two policies we identified as common responses across prisons around the world: limitations on visitation rights for prisoners, and early releases of prisoners. We found that all states in our sample implemented bans on visits, showing policy convergence.

How states tighten control: a field theory perspective on journalism in contemporary Crimea.

This article contributes to denationalizing Bourdieu's field theory by analysing the relationship between a regional news media field, the state and transnational influences. The article seeks to answer the question of how a state can impose limits on the autonomy of the news media field during political transition. Field theory is applied to changes that have taken place in Crimean news media since Russia's annexation of the peninsula in 2014.