Maartje van der Woude is Full Professor of Law and Society at Leiden University, at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society. Working at the intersection of law, criminology and socio-legal studies, she examines how migration, border and security policies are translated into organisational decisions and everyday practices.

More information about Maartje van der Woude

Maartje van der Woude is Full Professor of Law and Society at Leiden University, at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance and Society. Working at the intersection of law, criminology and socio-legal studies, she examines how migration, border and security policies are translated into organisational decisions and everyday practices.

Her research focuses particularly on migration governance, border policing, crimmigration, bureaucratic discretion and the relationship between law, politics and frontline decision-making. Across her work, she explores how professional norms, organisational pressures, emotions, race and ethnicity, national identity and political narratives shape the exercise of state power. She combines legal analysis with comparative and multi-sited empirical research, connecting developments at the level of legislation and policy to their implementation within organisations and their consequences for individuals and communities.

Van der Woude holds an LLM in Dutch Law, specialising in Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, an MSc in Criminology (cum laude) and a PhD in Criminal Law and Criminology, all from Leiden University. She has held various prestigious visiting and research positions at, among others, the University of California, Berkeley, UC Law San Francisco, the University of Maryland, the University of Oslo and the Université de Montréal. From 2026 to 2030, she is also a Mercator Fellow in the Research Training Group Mobility Rights in the Global Context of Multiple Crises at the University of Göttingen.

Research

Van der Woude’s research has made an important contribution to understanding the interrelationship between migration control, criminal justice and border governance. A central concern throughout her work is how broad legal and political objectives are interpreted and reshaped by organisations and public officials, and how discretionary decisions affect legitimacy, belonging and unequal treatment.

From 2017 to 2022, she led the NWO Vidi project Getting to the Core of Crimmigration. This comparative programme examined mobility control across seven Schengen border regions and included three doctoral research projects. Its findings were brought together in her sole-authored monograph The Mobility Control Apparatus: Getting to the Core of Crimmigration in the Schengen Area, published by Routledge in 2025. The book develops a multi-level account of how mobility control is assembled through the interaction of law, politics, organisational arrangements and frontline practice.

She currently leads the NWO project Emotional Labour in the Borderlands (2023–2027), which investigates how emotions, moral values, professional expectations and organisational settings shape border-police decision-making. She is also co-principal investigator of the NWA-funded programme Crafting Resilience (2022–2028), a multi-partner project conducted in eight Dutch cities. Within this programme, she leads research on the dilemmas of care and control encountered by public and social professionals.

Her work has appeared in journals including Theoretical Criminology, Security Dialogue, The British Journal of Criminology, European Journal of Criminology, Law & Social Inquiry, Crime, Law and Social Change and Policing and Society. In 2025, her article “Colourblindness across borders: The de-racialized logics of Dutch and American border agents”, co-authored with Irene Vega, received the Theoretical Criminology Best Article Prize.

Recognition and academic leadership

Van der Woude received the Heineken Young Scientists Award in the Humanities from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. The award recognised both her scholarship and her public engagement in the fields of terrorism, migration and cross-border crime. In 2014, she received the Ada and Paul Cornil Prize from Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a four-yearly Dutch-Belgian distinction for outstanding research in criminological sociology or criminal policy. She has been an appointed member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities since 2021. She regularly presents her research to international academic and professional audiences.

Van der Woude is Associate Director of Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford and a member of the Board of Directors of the Crimmigration Control International Net of Studies (CINETS). She is Editor-in-Chief of Crimmigration & Law (Boom Uitgevers) and, from 2025 to 2030, one of three Series Editors of Routledge Studies in Criminal Justice, Borders and Citizenship. She previously served as an elected Trustee on the international Board of the Law and Society Association.

Her academic work is closely connected to public and professional debate. She is a member of the Dutch Advisory Committee for Migration Affairs and the Scientific Advisory Council for the Dutch National Police, providing independent expertise on migration, policing and the operation of law in practice. Her long-term engagement with border-control and policing organisations has also enabled sustained empirical research and the development of research-informed professional education.

Teaching and supervision

Van der Woude teaches in the fields of law, criminology and sociology of law at undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels, in both Dutch and English. She has also been extensively involved in interdisciplinary and honours education at Leiden University, including as Director of the Honours College Law. She supervises doctoral researchers working on migration governance, border control, bureaucratic discretion, vulnerability, inequality and institutional practice. Through her teaching and supervision, she encourages students and early-career researchers to combine rigorous legal analysis with empirical and interdisciplinary approaches.

Photograph: Jussi Puikkonen

Activities