Immanuel Wallerstein Open Chair – Sixth session. Where is punitive power headed? Presented by Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni

Where is punitive power going?
Under the direction of Eugenio Raúl ZaffaroniUniversity of Buenos Aires | Former Minister of the Supreme Court of Justice
Friday, April 24, 2026

Commentators:
Esteban Torres (Director, IW Chair)
Luciana Cadahia (PUC, Chile) 

Punitive power and war are two closely linked political—not legal—phenomena. This is demonstrated by the history of our so-called Western civilization, from the colonization of the Americas to the present. Current punitivism is not unrelated to wars, and everything indicates that we are experiencing a moment of civilizational decline, not a crisis, because we do not know if this is a turning point. Criminal law, meanwhile, adopts an idealistic and solipsistic position to avoid incorporating data from this reality, postulating "theories of punishment" that it borrows from the 18th century and that have nothing to do with the actual punitive power in our societies. It thus becomes dangerously encapsulated and only provides solutions that facilitate the "bureaucratic comfort" of judicial operators. In doing so, it overlooks the fact that each objective assigned to punishment corresponds to a model of the State and an anthropological conception; that is, it treats the core of political science and philosophy as penal problems with an astonishing superficiality, proposing utopias that conceal the real dystopias of our America. It is urgent to correct course and stop elevating logic to ontology.

More information: https://sociales.unc.edu.ar/content/6-sesi-n-c-tedra-libre-immanuel-wallerstein-con-eugenio-zaffaroni

In this sixth session of the Immanuel Wallerstein Free Chair, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni presents the lecture “Where is punitive power going?”, where he addresses reflections on the challenges and transformations of punitive power today: