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The journal Socio&#160;is launching a call for papers on the theme of ‘The Prison in the World – new perspectives’. The dossier isco-ordinated by Falk Bretschneider (Centre Georg Simmel, EHESS) and Natalia Muchnik (Centre de recherches historiques, EHESS). Proposals forcontributions (title, 2 pages summary and bibliography) should be sent to Socio by 15 February 2019. The articles should be submitted by 15 May 2019.ArgumentThe Prison in the World: new perspectivesSince its beginning, the historiography of the prisonhas integrated the transnational dimension of its object by focussing inparticular on the circulation of projects and experiences. But large areas havebeen neglected. Thus most of the research bears on the beginning of the 19thcentury which some, like Michel Foucault or Michael Ignatieff in the 1970s and1980s, consider to be the period in which the sentence of imprisonment as westill know it today, originated. Attention has also centred on the reforms ofthe penal systems in the Western powers, mainly France, the United Kingdom andthe United States. This is why prison still appears today as a European andNorth American invention which subsequently spread to other continents, inparticular in the wake of colonisation.Revisiting the origins of the present-day prisonThis dossier aims to examine this construction byfollowing two main approaches. In the first instance, by considering whetherpenal imprisonment was perhaps the outcome of experiences prior to the FrenchRevolution, as is suggested by some recent research on the joint institutionsof the Ancien Régime, at one and the same time charitable and punitive, or onthe continuity between the monastic world and the prison world. While thesestudies do not challenge the generalisation of confinement as a punitive modelin the 19th century and the concomitant establishment of a specificpenitentiary discourse and practices. They do nevertheless propose theinscription of these processes in a broader chronological context whichincludes the multiples forms of enclosure of the disadvantaged or marginalisedfrom the 16th to the 19th century (hospitals, deviantreligious and secular persons in monasteries. Accordingly it would thereforeseem judicious, to question further, in particular by returning to the historyof prisons in Antiquity.But this chronological extension is also geographical.While the periods of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times have beendealt with in the Oxford History of thePrison, the standard work published in 1995 as a form of ‘pre-history’ ofprison, the same applies to the sub-title of the work: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. For thecontributors, the present-day prison is in the first instance, a European and NorthAmerican invention which spread, along with colonial conquests, to othercontinents. The Australian example, with its huge penitentiary colonies, servedas a model for other spaces, including in Asia. This hypothesis of the ‘spread’has been both confirmed and denied in recent research. On one hand, it cannotbe denied that practices of specific forms of confinement did exist in someextra-European areas before the arrival of the Western powers. This has beendemonstrated by Fariba Zarinebaf for the Ottoman Empire, Frank Dikötter forChina or Daniel Botsman for modern Japan. It does appear, however, that inother areas, the emergence of imprisonment was contemporaneous withcolonisation. This, for example, was the case in Africa, as is shown in the workof Florence Bernault, or in Indo-China where, according to Peter Zinoman, itwas the continuation of the prisoner-of-war camps established by the French. Asa result, we have to think of the two movements simultaneously: on the onehand, a global movement for ‘prison reform’ in the 19th century, thedriving force for this being located in the Western world, and thereconfigurations of local traditions which are not the mere outcome of amodernisation along Western-type lines. This means that a new history of theprison and practices of incarceration, which is both chronologically andgeographically open, is required today.Prison in the global ageNowadays in most countries in the world, custodialsentences dominate. However, while in the 19th century the legalaspects of imprisonment took shape in the international congresses attended byspecialists from all over the world, it seems today to be largely dominated bynational concerns. From being a transnational issue, has prison been reduced toa local issue today? The diversity of systems is obvious. The management ofcertain African or South-American prisons brings to mind the practices inEurope from the 16th to the 18th century (porosity, self-managementand self-sufficiency of the prisoners, insertion in the urban environment). Theissue therefore is also one of examining the current models of prison in thesocial sciences; these are often based on an exclusively Western andcontemporary experience. Can we not attempt to understand the relations betweenthese realities which are each unique and geographically located? In manyrespects, imprisonment today constitutes a global market (in prison design,techniques of supervision, infrastructures) characterised by a trend to theprivatisation of places of imprisonment and to sub-contracting by national orinternational firms. This economic dimension evokes numerous exchanges aroundpractices (methods of dealing with the detained, care, therapy, forms of work).Inaddition we have the question of religion, which gains in importance inparticular around the problem of radicalisation in relation to Islam, but notuniquely, in the prison environment.These various paths are of course not exclusive. Otherproposals examining the prison or other modes of incarceration, penal or not,in its global dimension, will be welcome.CalendarProposals for articles, of approximately 5,000 signs (2-3 pages, includingbibliography and notes) should be submitted by 15 February 2019 to the editor: socio@msh-paris.fr. &#160;These proposalsshould enable the editor to grasp precisely, both the research material onwhich the article is based, along with the problematic and the intellectualapproach of the author, the main hypotheses and the findings of the researchcarried out and the main concepts and references mobilised.After acceptance of the proposal, the article, approximately 30,000 signs (notes and bibliographyincluded), should reach the journal by 15 May 2019 at the latest. It will then be submitted to the reading panel and toexternal readers.We request authors to bear in mind the need to adopt astyle of writing which ensures that the issues dealt with in the article areaccessible to non-specialist readers.As far as possible, the authors are requested torespect the guidelines located on the site of the journal at the address: &#60;https://socio.revues.org/547&#62;.