This article is based on a research in which we are looking for exemplary urban professionals who seem to be successful in pursuing the social goals they set together with their partners. In urban disadvantaged neighbourhoods, it is not always the standard procedure that gets things done. In the Netherlands decades of urban renewal in its various forms have not solved problems permanently. This does not mean that success is never attained. What seems to have helped in some cases is the presence of a type of practitioner who goes beyond standard procedure. These are professionals, as the ‘casting cop’ we introduce in this article, who do not give up and who are able to succeed where others have failed. Most likely these are experienced practitioners who learned how to cope. Most likely they are actors who inspire others.What we ask is how these practitioners in urban districts do their job in controversial, politically sensitive policy processes that might develop in unintended and surprising ways. In other words we have as a central question: through what ways of working and relating do exemplary urban practitioner (try to) get things done?The professionals we call exemplary are not always taking the common routes to realize their goals. They will not automatically follow the routines of problem solving and because of that they can make a difference. They are critical about mainstream practices and try to find solutions starting from the perspectives of citizens. When we talk about ‘ways of working and relating’ we refer to the qualities these professionals put to use in the planning and decision making processes of urban renewal. It has to do with personal qualities like attitude and experience, but also with strategic skills such as networking with policy partners. ‘Getting things done’ means solving problems or better stated exploiting opportunities. More broadly is their aim to transform what is called ‘urban problem districts’ into ‘livable neighborhoods’.

On January 1, 2009 the Temporary Restraining Order Act entered into force allowing mayors to impose a ten-day restraining order on potential perpetrators of domestic violence. This restraining order, which may be extended to 28 days, prohibits the perpetrator from entering his or her house as well as from contacting the persons staying behind in the home (partner, children, or other members of the household). In order to impose a temporary restraining order, risk factors relating to the perpetrator, the incident, and the family have to be assessed using a domestic violence risk assessment tool (RiHG).The immediate cause to introduce the Act was to enable mayors to take action in situations that, before, would not have given police just cause to intervene because no offences had (yet) been committed. However, evaluations show that temporary restraining orders are mainly imposed in conjunction with criminal proceedings. Yet, researchers suggest that the temporary restraining order may be imposed as a truly preventive measure in a large amount of situations that until now have not been considered (for instance, situations that have not escalated into physical violence). This article examines whether such preventive restraining orders exist within a sample of imposed orders and if so, what characteristics they share.Results show that truly preventive restraining orders are extremely rare. Closer inspection of cases that according to the available risk assessment were not notably violent showed that most of these cases could not be regarded as cases of truly preventive restraining orders. The discussion of the article focuses on the implications of these results for the suggestion that a large number of situations could be suitable for imposing a preventive restraining order.

A number of authors claim that the Dutch government is using the words safety and security more often and more broadly. In this article we show that this is partly true. By studying the usage of the word safety in the Dutch queen’s speeches, we see that especially from 1999 onwards the speeches do contain more references to safety and security issues. Moreover, more and more topics are defined as a safety and security issue. However, this same study shows that a decline in the use of the words safety and security can be discerned from 2006 onwards. Ideas to understand these fluctuations are presented at the end of the article.

This article discusses whether the horizontal effect of human rights marks a new paradigm in legal systems or is merely a new style in legal rhetoric. In doing so, much attention is paid to the differences between direct and indirect horizontal effect. Departing from social contract theory the article explains that the protection of human right values in horizontal relations is an essential feature of modern constitutionalism. It also analyses whether these values in horizontal relations should be protected by private law or by human rights. This question is looked at from a substantial, a methodological and an institutional perspective. In the end, because of institutional power balancing, the article argues in favor of an indirect horizontal effect of human rights.

Hierarchical (labor) conflicts have a unique dynamic. Although power dynamics play a role in many interactions, they may play a crucial role in labor conflicts affecting the conflict itself and the subsequent mediation. In this paper, we look at the concept of power as well as different power sources in order to get more grip on the power balance between disputants. We show that when parties hold and/or perceive different power positions, parties differ strongly with regard to their perception of the conflict, their emotional experience but also their (conflict) behavior. For example, where a labor conflict may represent a very personal and painful event for the less powerful, it may be just one of the many tasks the more powerful has to deal with. Consequently, parties have different needs and expectations in order to solve the conflict. Knowledge of these processes is essential if one wishes to acquire insight in the power balance between disputants and/or intervene in labor conflicts.

Bij de ambtelijke voorbereiding van wetgeving wordt veelvuldig overleg gevoerd met belanghebbende partijen. Recent verricht empirisch wetgevingsonderzoek Naar een glazen wetgevingshuis? laat zien dat gedurende het proces sommige belanghebbende partijen worden uitgesloten en andere worden ingesloten. Het proces van insluiten en uitsluiten kan een partijdig wetgever in de hand werken. Het ‘fasenmodel’, een analysemiddel ontwikkeld in het wetgevingsonderzoek, laat zien dat drie fases van belangeninbreng en -afweging te onderscheiden zijn en per fase belanghebbende partijen worden toegelaten en buitengesloten. Dit model staat in deze bijdrage centraal. De bijdrage eindigt met een oproep tot vastlegging van processuele kwaliteitsnormen en enkele concrete mogelijkheden tot verbetering.

The Netherlands pursues an active policy of excluding and prosecuting potential perpetrators of international crimes. In recent years hundreds of people have been excluded from taking part in the asylum procedure. Bringing cases to court, however, has proven to be very difficult in practice. Most excluded persons reside illegally in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. A good overview of the grounds upon which persons have been excluded and with what types of crimes they are associated is currently lacking. The Netherlands – actually the international community as a whole – still struggles with a number of legal and ethical issues. International law, for example, does not provide an adequate solution for some convicted excluded asylum seekers after their release.

During the Second World War, a large number of prisoners were put to work in concentration camps in order to contribute to the development of Germany. As this labour became more important in economic terms during the years 1939 to 1945, the death toll in the camps also rose during the same period. This contribution aims at providing insight into the apparent contradiction (paradox) between the practices of extermination on the one hand and the German economic interests on the other hand. Not only has historiography paid relatively little attention to this phenomenon (it is not a main topic), criminology has also remained remarkably silent during this debate. Looking at the ‘plantation’ in Dachau concentration camp (1937-1945) we develop an exploratory analysis of the subject. Using Vaughan’s organizational criminology, we discuss the paradox and address the question of the extent to which criminology can offer explanations for phenomena of this kind.

This article develops a victimological perspective on international criminal justice, based on a review of the main victimological characteristics of international crimes. These include the complicity or active involvement of government agencies, the large numbers of victims and the peculiar position of international crime victims who, at the time the crimes are committed, are usually not viewed as victims by the perpetrators, but placed outside the moral sphere or even depicted as perpetrators rather than victims.Key elements of this perspective concern the external coherence of the criminal justice reaction - the interlinking of criminal justice with other reparative efforts - as well as its internal coherence - the extent to which the procedures of international criminal justice are aligned with what it realistically can and should achieve. With internal coherence in mind, the article examines the victimological findings relating to the main rights of victims in the criminal procedure (recognition/acknowledgement, information/participation and compensation/reparation) and subsequently analyzes how the specifics of international crimes moderate them.

What do we know about the criminological aspects of international crimes? What do they entail and what are facilitating factors which can help us understand their causes and how should we respond to these crimes? Are international crimes merely a more extreme form of ordinary crimes or are they a different kind of criminality? In the past few years a growing number of scholars both at a national and at an international level have devoted their scholarly attention to this important and urgent research theme. In this special issue we aim to present a number of articles in which different perspectives on this topic are presented. By doing so we hope to enhance our knowledge of this phenomenon and to provide an impulse to further criminological research within this area in both the Netherlands and Belgium. This introductory article gives an overview of the state of the art of international crime criminology in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the rest of the world.

During the 1990s the Serbian government entered into a symbiotic relationship with criminals and paramilitary units which led to a normalization of crime and violence. While society usually inhibits people from criminal behavior, in Serbia this process was reversed. Propaganda contained the neutralization techniques that allowed people to condone and even approve of violent and criminal behavior. The reversal of the moral order became part of Serbia’s popular culture in which criminals who had committed many atrocities during the war, like Arkan, were honored. In this way, Arkan served not only a military and strategic purpose but also a political one, by generating support for the war.

In the current literature on child soldiers, many assumptions are made about the use of child soldiers worldwide. The duration of conflicts and thus increasing number of battle related deaths would influence the use of child soldiers. Another assumption is that child soldiers are mainly used in civil wars. In this article, these assumptions are tested empirically and the characteristics of conflicts in which child soldiers are used and conflicts in which they are not used are compared. However, conducting quantitative research on child soldiers is not easy. Many data are obtained through interviews and are based on unconfirmed reports and observations, which raises questions about how the data should be assessed. This study is an explorative study into the possibilities of testing some of the current assumptions.

This paper deals with the question of how a partly privatized security sector could be regulated. A central aim of this regulation should be the control of security as a public good. Three models of regulation are analyzed. The current practice of this regulation in the Netherlands shows a serious lack of effectiveness. One of our main conclusions is that neither the state nor the private sector is able to enforce this regulation on their own. However, it is assumed that the state should have a central and integrated regulatory role in this field, with more attention paid to the practical implementation of it, with the power and will to sanction private agencies if necessary. In addition managers of private security companies should adopt a role as public managers with a public moral duty. Regulation of security is faced with a double problematic, not only the horizontal fragmentation of the field, but also the vertical fragmentation, often resulting in a serious gap between managers and those in the field, both in the public and the private sector. This implies that the regulation should not only rest on the state and on self-regulation by the sector at management level, but also on the promotion of a practical ethic for security workers to steer and regulate their daily work.

The author provides a discussion of the articles in this issue of the Tijdschrift voor Veiligheid (Journal on Security) on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. He notes that there is an increasing hybridising, subjectification and fragmentation in the security area. The increasing interweaving of security politics seems to apply least to a common approach in ‘social security and physical safety issues’ (crime control and disaster and crisis management), while exactly this was aimed for in so-called integral security politics. According to the author that is the case because of ‘the moral pin’, which plays a dominant role in crime, but not in safety issues. The entanglement of forms of security identified by the author has a normative basis – it comes from the social order of an increasingly complex society. For the future an ever greater responsibilisation can be expected, in which the perception of security becomes even more important than it is now already. Not a big orchestrated security policy, but jazzy structures will then determine the prospects.

The concept of transnationalism refers to border-crossing activities and social relations, such as family relations, migration, international trade and international organisations. It is argued that transnationalism is an important topic in the sociology of law for three reasons: the transnationalisation of law (laws travel across borders), the law under transnationalism (transnational processes affect law) and classic socio-legal themes may gain a new and exciting lease of life when used in a transnational context. Transnationalism touches on the core of the sociology of law: studying the relation between law and society and the social working of law. Socio-legal scholars should look beyond the national borders, include non-state actors in their analysis and take notice of how rules are used in different localities.

In transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases, spouses can come into contact with two different legal systems. Many different kinds of organisations are involved, offering social and legal advice and aid in these transnational divorces: advising and referring clients, educating spouses and professionals, and influencing policy. In this article these organisations are analysed as participants in a transnational field of legal aid, using Moore’s concept of the semi-autonomous social field. It becomes clear that these organisations share norms on transnational divorce: they frame transnational divorce as a women’s problem, and one of complex, interacting rules and regulations. These norms form the source of rules on how to handle law in transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases.

In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.