Women and Captivity in Greece Historical, Sociological and Anthropological Perspectives

Gender has long attracted the attention of social researchers as key to understanding Mediterranean societies and their institutions. Custodial and cognate systems across the Mediterranean region have also received increasing international research attention in recent years. Yet little has been done to date to explore the place of women in those systems. This collection helps fill this curious gap by exploring various dimensions of the relationship between women and captivity in the specific context of Greece, from the 19th century to contemporary times. Greece is a country currently at the epicentre of international attention, not just because of the recent and ongoing financial crisis there, but also because Greek criminal justice and related institutions have been found systematically to violate basic international human rights legislation. The collection makes a unique contribution to a range of disciplines, particularly to criminology, history, sociology, anthropology and politics. The work breaks new ground by broadening the analysis of captivity beyond imprisonment to include such institutions as political exile and immigration detention, tracing important commonalities and continuities between them across historical and geographical spans. At the same time, the volume contributes conceptual tools, theoretical notions and empirical insights to key debates currently ongoing within and across different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities.

The book will be a valuable resource for researchers and academics with an interest in punishment, state violence, gender relations and feminism.