On September 17–19, Dr Rūta Vaičiūnienė, Chief Researcher, and Goda Dainauskaitė, Junior Researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (LCSS), participated in the 6th Annual International Conference "Punishment in Global Peripheries", held this year in Astana, Kazakhstan. This Central Asian country was not chosen for the conference by accident—the area around Astana was an important site of Soviet convict settler colonialism, and Kazakhstan today is a country experiencing dynamic processes of penal change. This year, Nazarbayev University (Kazakhstan) joined the conference organisers—the University of Oxford (UK), the National University of the Littoral (Argentina), the University of A Coruña (Spain), and the University of Sheffield (UK) - as a co-host.

R. Vaičiūnienė and G. Dainauskaitė delivered a presentation titled "Penal Modernity at the European Periphery: Glocal Prison Governance in Lithuania." The researchers highlighted that Lithuanian prisons remain a site where European penal norms continue to encounter the enduring legacy of Soviet punishment practices. Decades of reform have introduced Western managerial elements, yet Soviet-era practices have not disappeared. Rather than displacing one another, both coexist, producing a distinctively glocal form of prison governance. Here, global and European penal models are reinterpreted and fused with locally entrenched institutional logics and informal power arrangements. The presenters' research reveals that this situation should be understood not merely as hybridisation, but as the active encounter between global penal models and local institutional realities.