The conference Norms in the Margins and Margins of the Norm The Social Construction of Illegality proposes to reflect on the relations between the dynamics of criminalization and the construction of State powers, on the one hand, and on criminal strategies – legal or not –, moral economies in the illegal spheres, the ploys and tactics of “deviant” groups on the other hand. Law and the informal norms tied to its various uses are viewed as processes seized upon and retailored by actors for their own purposes and strategies, in a context where penal policies commanding conformity in collective behavior are not necessarily aimed at eliminating crime and illegalism (Foucault), but essentially broaden the areas of intersection and interaction between State coercion, criminal trajectories, and the management of norms. These considerations suggest various potential tracks for analysis. How do State and supra-national criminalization activities construct landscapes of illegality? How are the legal and illegal sides of global capitalism’s underground economies intertwined? What are the ethical justifications given for the legal and illegal constructions? How are norms inhabited, legitimized and challenged in the marginal spheres of today’s illegal and criminal worlds? How are the legality and legitimacy of the illegality-producing societal spheres maintained and perpetuated? Another area of inquiry would bear on our practice as researchers. How can we, as researchers, circulate in the spaces created by penal policies, between the analysis of state-led coercive processes and the observation of criminal trajectories? What ethical, political and epistemological issues are raised by investigation of the illegal and criminal spheres? Faced with objects of this sort, what positions and reflexive policies can research advance? Studies will therefore pertain both to the production of the categories of illegality and to the production of ethical categories in the underworld, while stressing the intertwining and ambiguous entanglements of legal and illegal networks and creation of moral economies.