We connect scholars across borders.

CINETS foregrounds legal identity, rights, and networked justice — studying punitive migration control as political performance in democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian settings.

The network welcomes interdisciplinary work across migration law, criminology, political science, socio-legal studies, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory.

CINETS emerged from a shared concern that the growing entanglement of criminal law, migration control, borders, and citizenship required sustained critical attention. Its intellectual origins can be traced to conversations among scholars at the 2011 Law and Society Association meeting in San Francisco, where the concept, reach, and consequences of crimmigration were debated across different national and disciplinary contexts.

Those exchanges became the starting point for the Crimmigration Control International Network of Scholars — CINETS — and for the first international CINETS conference, organised at the University of Coimbra in 2012 under the visionary leadership of Dr. Maria João Ferreira Duarte da Guia. From the outset, the network has sought to create a space for critical, comparative, and socio-legal engagement with the ways criminal justice and migration control shape one another.

The network’s founding conversations drew on early scholarship examining how immigration and crime became intertwined in law and policy — work that helped name and frame the field of crimmigration as an object of sustained critical study.

Over time, CINETS has developed from a conference initiative into an international community bringing together scholars, practitioners, artists, activists, and others working on the changing legal, institutional, political, and lived realities of crimmigration. Its history is marked by sustained international exchange, collaboration across disciplines and jurisdictions, and a commitment to rigorous, critical, and socially engaged scholarship.