Research

MARCEN is a five-year research project (2025–2029) funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The project explores the mechanisms that lead to the legal inclusion and exclusion of the Sámi people in Sweden, Norway and Finland, with a particular focus on the contemporary Sámi Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in these Nordic countries.

MARCEN examines how rights development, mobilisation, and transitional justice processes affect settler states’ legal inclusion and exclusion of the Sámi people. The project is divided into four work packages:

  • Legal Governance and Rights Development investigates how supranational and national legal regulation and rights developments affect the governance of indigeneity
  • Changing State Policies analyses the historical perspective (1920s–2020s) of indigeneity framing and governance.
  • Transitional Justice studies the impetuses, scopes, and effects of indigenous truth and reconciliation commissions.
  • Sámi Rights Mobilisation examines how Indigenous groups have used law and global rights discourses to mobilise, voice claims, and improve their position.

The project aims to develop a new socio-legal theory on the mechanisms of legal inclusion and exclusion. It also seeks to develop interdisciplinary methodologies, tests the hypothesis that a culture of rights has been reciprocally constitutive of socio-legal indigenous identities, and creates novel conceptual tools for investigating the changing legal governance and construction of indigeneity. Additionally, it conceptualises the work of the Sámi truth and reconciliation commissions as a transitional justice process in a non-transitional, democratic context.

MARCEN utilises an innovative methodology that combines doctrinal legal analysis, historical analysis, legal mobilisation analysis, comparative analysis, frame analysis, and content and contextual analysis. The project’s findings are expected to have broad relevance, extending, for example, to fields of integration, migration, marginalisation, inequality and discrimination.

The PI of the ERC Starting Grant project is Daniela Alaattinoğlu, an Assistant Professor and Docent at the Faculty of Law of the University of Turku. Her research group will include two postdoctoral researchers, a doctoral researcher, a research assistant and a project coordinator.