Principal Investigator
Steffen Bo Jensen
Dr. Steffen Bo Jensen is the Director of CONFINED and a Professor at the Department of Politics and Society, Aalborg University. His research concerns state coercion, gangs, and policing. More information is available on his research profile in the link above.
Project Partners
Andrew M. Jefferson
Sierra Leone - UK case
Andrew M. Jefferson is a senior researcher at DIGNITY – Danish Institute Against Torture, where for the past two decades he has conducted ethnographic research in the global south on sites of confinement and efforts to mitigate their harms. Current work focuses on thinking through ways to inhibit torture and social harm that draw on intellectual traditions associated with prison abolitionism, as well as considering ways to strengthen links between civil society activism and the academy to negate the harmful effects of repression and state power.
Bencharat Sae Chua
Myanmar - Thailand case
Bencharat Sae Chua is the lecturer at the Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University. Thailand. Her research focus on human rights, democratization and displacement.
Jasmin Lilian Diab
Lebanon - Denmark case
Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/هي) is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity. In 2025, her research was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize from the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). Jasmin is a research affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University and a global fellow at Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. Her research explores the intersections of migration, gender, conflict, humanitarianism and international law.
Luisa T. Schneider
Sierra Leone - UK case
Dr. Luisa T. Schneider is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work explores the intersections of intimacy, violence, and law. Her research focuses on how individuals seek love, safety, and community amid conditions of harm and exclusion—particularly in contexts of houselessness, violence, and incarceration. She is currently an Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam and a Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Schneider is also an advisor to policymakers and practitioners working at the nexus of social justice and care. For over a decade, she has conducted in-depth ethnographic research that centers the value of local knowledge and lived experience. Her scholarship includes the f monograph Love and Violence in Sierra Leone (Cambridge University Press, 2025), as well as articles such as “‘Let Me Take a Vacation in Prison’” (Punishment & Society, 2023) or “Sexual Violence During Research” (Critique of Anthropology, 2020).
Mette-Louise E. Johansen
Lebanon - Denmark case
Mette-Louise E. Johansen is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Center for Social Science Research – VIVE. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and she has conducted ethnographic research for the past fifteen years on the relation between families of Palestinian descent, the police and welfare state authorities in urban Denmark. Her work focuses on welfare state policing, gangs, violence, marginalization, kinship and intimate everyday life among refugee families in Denmark and the Nordics. Her scholarly work includes articles, as well as several edited volumes within Anthropology and Criminology, such as “Intimate Belongings: Kinship and State Relatedness in Migrant Families in Denmark” (Genealogy, 2022), “Paradoxical Orders: Parenting Encounters, the Welfare State and Difference in Europe” (Ethnography, 2022) and “Moral Outrage: The Generative Power of Political Emotions” (Conflict and Society, 2028).
Samantha Jeffries
Myanmar - Thailand case
Dr Samantha Jeffries is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Her research focuses on marginalised social statuses, criminalisation, victimisation and (in)justice. She has researched intimate partner violence; the sex industry; gender, Indigeneity and sentencing decisions. In focus most recently are the needs and experiences of domestic violence victims in family law, criminal and restorative justice processes. For more than a decade, Samantha has collaborated with the Thailand Institute of Justice (TIJ), undertaking studies on gendered pathways to criminalisation; human rights and women’s experiences of imprisonment, re-integration, and non-custodial measures. She has co-authored a book on domestic violence (Romantic Terrorism: An Autoethnography of Domestic Violence, Victimisation and Survival with Sharon Hayes) and co-edited the book Gender, Criminalization, Imprisonment and Human Rights in Southeast Asia (with Andrew M. Jefferson). In partnership with TIJ, Samantha regularly conducts Bangkok Rules (The United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders) training with criminal justice personnel in Southeast Asia and beyond. She has been invited and subsequently provided expert advice to Australian governments and international organisations in the areas of gender, criminalisation, imprisonment and gender-based violence.
Tomas Max Martin
Myanmar - Thailand case
Tomas Max Martin specialises in prison ethnography and the anthropology of the state with a focus on the appropriation of human rights, carceral technologies and penal architectures. Martin is a senior researcher at DIGNITY and currently researches present histories of incarceration in Myanmar. He recently engaged in new research agendas on vernacular accountability and the interface between everyday violence and climate change in Uganda.
Tamirace Fakhoury
Lebanon - Denmark case
Tamirace Fakhoury is an Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Her research focuses on the dilemmas of peace and democratization in post-conflict societies, the politics of refuge and migration in conflict-affected areas, and the role of actors as the European Union and the United Nations in conflict and cooperation. Tamirace has been awarded the Carlsberg Monograph fellowship to write a book on politics, chronic crises and time. Before joining Fletcher, she was an Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark, and served as the visiting Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. Tamirace holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and has conducted postdoctoral research at the European University Institute in Florence and the University of California, Berkeley.
Shannon Morreira
Malawi - South Africa case
Shannon Morreira is an anthropologist and Associate Professor at the multi-disciplinary Umthombo Centre, University of Cape Town. Her research is largely qualitative and ethnographic in nature, and centres on the effect of coloniality – the underlying epistemological frameworks that remain in place in post-colonial settings - on the contemporary social world, including through human rights law and alternative forms of justice; citizenship and diaspora studies; and higher education studies.
PhD Fellows
Anarim Chahabi
Lebanon - Denmark case
Anarim Chahabi is a PhD Fellow at The Department of Politics & Society at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. Her PhD research combines ethnographic methods and socio-legal approaches to examine confinement, displacement and family networks among Palestinian families in Denmark and in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Her work explores how confinement—rooted in intersectional oppressions, marginalization, displacement, incarceration, and statelessness—is navigated and negotiated across gender, generations and borders, encompassing forms of confinement that range from urban marginalization in Denmark to life in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
Daphne Langwe
Malawi - South Africa case
Daphne Langwe is a gender studies and migration scholar whose work has centered around integrating participatory arts-based approaches in research and social advocacy among local communities in Malawi.
Nadine Coetzee
Sierra Leone - UK case
Nadine is an architect and international development practitioner with a decade of experience delivering projects, research and events for and with marginalised urban populations. Since 2016 she has committed to addressing inequalities in housing, basic services, gender and land informed by practical experience collaborating with civil society actors across urban Africa. As a PhD fellow within CONFINED Nadine’s research across Freetown and London will explore how urban marginalisation is resisted through agency, activism, and grassroots responses in order to reveal how kinship networks and home-making practices are shaped by structural pressures and lived solidarities.
Sai Hkur
Myanmar - Thailand case
Sai Hkur a PhD student at Institute of Human Rights and Peace Studies, Mahidol University, Thailand. His research focus on Shan migration.