Our team is growing

The Border Criminologies team continues to grow and branch out from its Oxford base. We are pleased to announce that Maartje van der Woude from the University of Leiden has joined the team as an Associate Director.  

Maartje's bio 

Prof. dr. Maartje van der Woude is full professor of Sociology of Law at Leiden Law School, the Netherlands. Her expertise lies with legal and social matters related to (counter)terrorism, (border)security and immigration, and the growing interconnectedness of all three. Over the past couple of years, Van der Woude has published extensively – in English and Dutch – on etho-racial profiling, border policing, (counter)terrorism and crimmigration.

In 2016, Van der Woude was granted one of the competitive VIDI grants as issued by the  Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for her research project “Getting to the Core of Crimmigration: Assessing the Role of Discretion in Managing Internal Cross-Border Mobility.” In this 5-year project, together with a team of senior and junior international scholars, Van der Woude aims to further map and identify the process and consequences of the ongoing securitization of migration in the context of the governance of cross-border mobility in various EU and non- EU countries.

The project is driven by two assumptions: First the notion that the exercise of power is not a one-way, topdown street, but rather a fundamentally associative process involving a perpetual negotiation between various levels of power on which discretionary decisions are made, such as the supranational (EU) level, the state level and the street-level. Street-level border police officers can be thought of as dynamic agents who do not merely submit to a power structure, but who also participate in the shaping of that structure. Second, the notion that the support and/ or resistance in local border communities for the (supra) national efforts of transforming political, economic and social structures within these localities is vital for the effectivity and legitimacy of the discretionary policies and practices.