Teresa Degenhardt has a law degree from the University of Bologna, an MA in Criminology and Research Methods from Keele University, and a PhD from Ulster University, Northern Ireland. She has held visiting positions in Berkeley, Hamburg, and Turin, and, as a student, in New York, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. Based on her interest in investigating social and institutional reactions to behavior deemed to be criminal or harmful within a transnational and international context, she turned to studying state policies on migration, focusing on the use of detention through an abolitionist perspective. She also looked at the management of migrants in immigration detention in the UK during the first COVID-19 lockdown.

Her Routledge book War as Protection and Punishment: Armed Intervention at the ‘End of History’ provides an analysis of how penal discourses are used to legitimate post-Cold War military interventions through three main case studies: Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya. These cases reveal the operation of diverse modalities of punishment in extending the ambit of international liberal governance. This analysis shows the contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities that these military interventions created at the local level.

In the past, Teresa has worked on second-generation migrants and on prostitution, theoretically on some criminalising/victimizing feminist understandings of prostitution, and empirically on crimes committed against female migrants by criminal organizations, in the context of Italy’s restrictive migration regimes. She is also part of the Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Algorithmic Solutions (LINAS).