Introduction

This collection explores the evolving and contested relationship between citizens and the state through the lenses of human rights, criminal justice, and socio-legal scholarship. It examines how state authority is exercised, justified, and resisted, and how citizens experience law as both a mechanism of protection and a tool of control. Across its chapters, the book addresses pressing contemporary issues, including protest and dissent, counterterrorism, surveillance, policing, access to justice, and post-conviction reform, to reveal how legal processes and state practices shape the lived realities of justice and belonging. The contributions highlight the tensions between ideals of fairness, equality, and accountability and the structural inequalities that undermine them. Drawing together doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical approaches, the volume offers new insights into how law operates as a social institution and a site of contestation. Ultimately, it invites readers to reconsider the boundaries of citizenship and the responsibilities of the state, asking what justice demands in a time when democratic legitimacy, human rights, and public trust in institutions are increasingly under strain.