Ida Nafstad

Associate Professor

Coordinator for the Master's Programme in Sociology of Law

Research Areas

• Law and marginalization
• Postcolonialism
• Legal Pluralism

Current Research

My main research interest is law and marginalization – the excluding and integrating effects of legal orders. I am interested in exclusion of marginalized groups of the populations as it relates to criminal law and formal justice systems, the response to this exclusion by means of creating other types of integrating mechanisms and informal legal orders, field specific norms, and social control, and the mutual effect and interrelation of exclusion and integration.  

I am working with a research project called ‘The Social Construction of Parallel Society in the Swedish Public Discourse’. The term parallel society is new to Sweden, but has lately been increasingly used in newspaper articles and reports from the police, where it is framed as a force on its way to take over core societal structures in social vulnerable areas, such as criminal- and private law, banking, housing- and labor market. The term has been used to describe a danger scenario – an unwillingness to integrate, a growing risk of disintegrated society, ethnic colonies, and Islamic fundamentalism. In this project I aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how vulnerable areas are portrayed in the public discourse about parallel society, whether and how the approaches of the state’s coercive powers in the areas are affected by that discourse, and how that correspond with the inhabitants’ understandings of the areas.