This book critically investigates Nordic criminal justice as a global role model. Not taking this role for granted, the chapters of the book analyze how Nordic approaches to criminal justice were folded into global contexts, and how patterns of promotion were built around perceptions that these approaches also had a particular value for other criminal justice systems. Specific actors, both internal and external to the region itself, have branded Nordic criminal justice as a form of 'penal exceptionalism' associated with human rights, universalistic welfare, and social cohesion. The book shows how building and using the brand of Nordic criminal justice allowed stakeholders to champion specific forms of crime control across a variety of criminal justice areas in both domestic and international settings. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminal justice, international law and justice, Nordic and Scandinavian studies, and more widely to the social sciences and humanities.

Advocates of Humanity offers an analysis of international criminal justice from the perspective of sociology of punishment by exploring the role of human rights organizations in their mobilization for global justice through the International Criminal Court (ICC). Based on multi-sited ethnography, primarily in The Hague and Uganda, the author approaches the transnational networks of NGOs advocating for the ICC as an ethnographic object. A central objective is to explore how connections are made, and how forces and imaginations of global criminal justice travel. By analyzing how international criminal justice is arranged spatially, and as such expresses social, political, and cultural relations of power, Advocates of Humanity shows how international criminal justice is situated in particular spaces, networks, and actors, and how they structure the imaginations of justice circulating in the field. From a sociology of punishment perspective, it compares the 'penal imaginations' of domestic and international criminal justice, and considers the particularly central role of victims as a universalized symbol of humanity for the legitimacy of international criminal justice. With clear global asymmetries emerging from the work, Advocates of Humanity provides descriptive as well as explanatory understandings of criminal punishment 'gone global', analyzing its social causation while examining its cultural meanings, particularly as regards its role as an expression of 'the international' will to punish. To whom is it meaningful, and why?