In the past decades, organised crime internationalised rapidly as a result of increasing mobility and ‘open’ borders. At the same time developments in information and communication technology have led to modernisation of existing types of crime and the introduction of novel ones. Finally, criminals have benefited from increasingly diversified migration streams. In the Netherlands and Belgium, organised crime appeared on the agenda in the 1990s. For a long time emphasis was on ‘trade crimes’ i.e. trafficking in drugs and humans, as well as human smuggling, followed by the production of synthetic drugs and cannabis. More recently the Low Countries are confronted by more visible manifestations of organised crime, for example rapid growth of outlaw motorcycle gangs. Criminals also try to utilise their capital to invest in businesses and real estate and to influence local politics.

In this introductory article we introduce the subject of our thematic issue on ‘macro criminology’, and illustrate it with a short historical overview and examples of ‘typical macro criminological’ research. Successively we address the recent decrease in crime in many Western countries (the ‘crime drop’), the increased tendency to punish more severely in the last decennia (the ‘punitive turn’), and historical developments in homicide (‘history of violence’). After that we address an important theoretical and philosophical problem with regard to macro criminology: the balance between micro and macro factors in explaining macro phenomena. Finally, the contributions of this thematic issue are introduced.