Professor Lucia Zedner

BA, MA, DPhil, FBA
Senior Research Fellow since 2016

Much of my recent research has focused on the state’s pursuit of crime prevention and public protection. My future research plans will explore the state-citizen relationship to ask what grounds the authority of the state to exercise coercive power over its citizens; what are the legitimacy conditions of its policing function; and what protections are due to the individual against the arbitrary exercise of state power? The historical assumption that these questions relate only to the sovereign state’s prosecution of domestic criminal law is challenged by emerging practices of cross-border law enforcement, resort to immigration law as crime control, and the policing of non-citizens. These developments raise complex legal and political issues beyond the state-citizen relation and invite fresh theorising of the grounds of state authority to police both citizens and non-citizens, to enforce law at and beyond its borders, and to tackle the risks posed by citizens recruited to terrorism overseas by curtailing or depriving them of the rights of citizenship.