Referring to the title of the first part of this volume – ‘setting the framework’ – Immi Tallgren explains that there is not one framework in which the ‘why punish’ question can be asked. Instead different frames are required to draw attention to the plurality of perspectives that could be taken on international punishment. Thus, in her comment, Tallgren pictures the landscape in which ‘why punish’ is asked and thereby sheds light on the contexts of that context of knowledge, its production, reproduction and subjectivities. While sketching out these frames – the frame of law, the frame of criminology, the moral frame, the frame of ‘fantasmatic logic’ and the frame of politics – Tallgren makes visible the outside of the chapters ‘setting the framework’ and discusses what aspects of the ‘why punish’ question are missing in this volume, and whose voice is excluded from our debate.