In the public spheres of the global cities, religion is getting more visible. However, this is not an independent process, but is linked to broader urban processes like segregation, security and (fear of) crime. With two different examples from Istanbul, this article explains how religious motivations become ways of expression for existing or emerging lines of urban segregation. While religious motivations appear as a tool used against urban gentrification in the area of Tophane; in the gated community of Basaksehir, religion, together with ‘fear of crime’ and ‘fear of immorality’, serves to differentiate a middle class living space from the ‘scary’ and ‘immoral’ environment of the big city.

In this article, the authors explore how active state support for religions and worldviews could be in accordance with the principle of liberal neutrality. They focus on the Belgian church-state policy because this policy is characterised by an explicit and extended form of active support for recognised worldviews. If this policy is in accordance with liberal neutrality, some other, weaker forms of state support for religions and worldviews may also be in accordance with this neutrality principle. In the light of these considerations, the authors make some suggestions about possible ways to bring the Belgian church-state policy more in accordance with liberal neutrality.

This contribution focuses on ‘fear of crime’ research. Departing from the classic distinction between crime and victimization as objective threats, on the one hand, and fear of crime as a subjective and emotional interpretation of that threat, on the other hand, the research tradition is confronted with the so-called fear victimization paradox. This paradox emerges from the observation that fear of crime is greater among women and elderly people, while these groups actually are less at risk of becoming a crime victim. It has immersed the research tradition in a dominant debate on the rationality of the fear of crime, with two opposing paradigms: rationalist and symbolic.Whilst both the paradox and the different paradigms in the debate offer a view at the core of fear of crime research, and illustrate how similar empirical observations can lead to differing explanations, and policy implications for that matter, we argue that the fear victimization paradox and the rationality debate surrounding this paradox, has occupied the bulk of research on fear of crime with what is essentially a nonsensical and redundant debate.

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.

In this concluding article, Gunther Teubner addresses his critics.

This contribution explores how much state is necessary to make societal constitutionalism work. I first ask why the idea of a global societal constitutionalism ‘beyond the state-and-politics’ might be viewed as a significant and controversial, but nonetheless justified innovation. In the second part I discuss what Teubner calls ‘the inclusionary effects of fundamental rights’. I argue that Teubner underplays the mediating role of the state in guaranteeing inclusion or access, and in a way presupposes well-functioning states in the background. In areas of limited statehood there is a problem of enforcing fundamental rights law. It is an open question whether, and under which conditions, constitutional norms within particular global social spheres can provide enough counter-weight when state constitutional norms are lacking.

Violations of human rights by transnational corporations and by other ‘private’ global actors raise problems that signal the limits of the traditional doctrine of ‘horizontal effects’. To overcome them, constitutional law doctrine needs to be complemented by perspectives from legal theory and sociology of law. This allows new answers to the following questions: What is the validity basis of human rights in transnational ‘private’ regimes – extraterritorial effect, colère public or external pressures on autonomous law making in global regimes? Do they result in protective duties of the states or in direct human rights obligations of private transnational actors? What does it mean to generalise state-directed human rights and to respecify them for different social spheres? Are societal human rights limited to ‘negative’ rights or is institutional imagination capable of developing ‘positive’ rights – rights of inclusion and participation in various social fields? Are societal human rights directed exclusively against corporate actors or can they be extended to counteract structural violence of anonymous social processes? Can such broadened perspectives of human rights be re-translated into the practice of public interest litigation?

This article presents some critical comments concerning the conceptual, normative and institutional foundations of Teubner’s plea for a ‘common law constitution’. My comments question the desirability of the means chosen for attaining this objective as well as their efficacy. In particular, I have difficulties with the ambivalent role that is assigned to man, either as a person or as a human being; with the reduction of social problems to problems of communication; and, finally and most importantly, with the attempt to conceive of law and politics beyond established legal and political institutions, which in my view is doomed to fail. The conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for an alternative approach.

In this interview with René van Swaaningen Jock Young discusses the development of his work from the ethnographic work in Notting Hill that in 1971 led to the The Drugstakers, to the New Criminology of 1973 and Left Realism that emerged in the early 1980s. In his current work on cultural criminology Young invites us to take a closer look at the work of C. Wright Mills on sociological imagination and the power elites and Robert Merton’s on social structure and anomie. According to Young this would make a forceful critique of the current policy-ridden and a-theoretical state criminology is currently in.

This article describes and judges the complex and often contradictory dynamic by which boundaries are constructed and transgressed. This dynamic reveals much about power, meaning, and the political economy of crime and control. The author describes the project undertaken by Critical Mass riders and precarity activists. These projects explore the possibilities of drift as collective experience and collective transgression. The pervasiveness of drift in contemporary society, paired with the subversive cultures of drift emerging around new social movements and alternative spatial practices, point toward a new kind of global collectivity.

In the introduction to this first issue of the Dutch Journal on Culture and Crime, the editors first examine the history of cultural perspectives in criminology and the reasons why this approach is particularly relevant to analyse crime in our globalised consumer societies. Cultural criminology’s social-constructionist perspectives on the key-concepts, culture and crime, are elaborated next, followed by an exposé of the new imaginative meaning of media-studies in our age of information. In the last paragraph the claim is made that, although ethnography plays a key-role, there is a wide variety of research methodologies that can be applied in cultural criminological framework.

Atlas of the Conflict by Israeli architect Malkit Shoshan presents a fascinating historical analysis of a difficult relationship between Jews and Palestinians. It shows, in maps and diagrams, a great discrepancy in perceptions of both people on such issues as borders, land, heritage, water and settlements. Visual research methods, which are used in this project, are important and innovative to get a deeper insight in the nature of this conflict. However some questions about misuse, propaganda and manipulation of information and symbols remain open and can lead to an important discussion in cultural criminology on the relationship between conflict and culture.

In this article the author presents Latour’s negative analysis of modernity and his positive ethnographical studies of the modes of existence of our modern world. I will discuss the merits and disadvantages of his specific approach on law – an institutional ethnography of the French Conseil d’Etat – within this framework. The analysis will be supplemented with the results of a conflict-based approach to a case study in patent law at a law firm.

In recent decades the night-time economy has started to play a significant role in city centre regeneration; it has become a vital element of the urban economy, as well as a marketing tool in the competition between cities. Concerns about personal safety and fear of crime determine to a large extent the success of these nightlife districts. Based on an analysis of policy documents, night-time observations and expert interviews with stakeholders in the Safe Nightlife Programmes of Rotterdam and Utrecht, different local safety measures and their legitimizations in different local urban settings will be analysed. The question raised is how surveillance measures in different nightlife districts are legitimized, taking into account the fact that cities' nightlife districts do not only need to be safe, but are also favoured by its visitors for adventure and excitement. What are the social implications of these surveillance measures and what does this mean for the character of cities' nightlife districts?

In het artikel wordt nagegaan hoe het komt dat de verhouding tussen slachtoffer en verzekeraar in een whiplashzaak vaak gepolariseerd is. Het lijkt er op dat de polarisatie mede veroorzaakt wordt door de gevolgen van een aantal recente maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen, onder meer een reductionistische benadering van gezondheidsklachten en de nadruk op authenticiteit. Bepleit wordt bij de behandeling van whiplashzaken in rechte de subjectieve klachten van het slachtoffer serieus te nemen, waardoor ruimte ontstaat om te onderzoeken of de klachten alleen het gevolg zijn van het ongeval of ook samenhangen met andere persoons- of omgevingsfactoren van het slachtoffer.

On the basis of current definitions and approaches of restorative justice and crime prevention, and making use of a two-dimensional typology of crime prevention, this article develops a conceptual framework and seeks to offer points of connections and departure at the theoretical level between restorative justice practices and different models of offender-oriented, victim-oriented and community-oriented prevention. In order to face some of the present limitations of restorative justice, in particular the missing link to causes of crime at the societal-structural level, the author widens the perspective of restorative justice to the broader notion of ‘community justice’. The challenge for restorative justice is, then, to integrate polycentric problem-solving approaches into its operational models.

The main question of this article is why the existing diverse populist movements have at least one feature in common: Crime, security and harsher punishments are high on their political agenda. The author points out that the rise of criminality in the last 20 years is a real basis for the growing anxiety among the population about insecurity. This anxiety is reinforced by the blown up media attention for crime issues. The dominance of the security issue is further explained and enhanced by cultural factors like individualisation, migration and the rise of a vitalist culture characterised by a geografical and normative boundlessness. In this context norm violations are always lurking and contributing to an insecure, complex and chaotic society. (In)security has become the common denominator to which all grievances can be reduced. The creation of new structures giving reassurance could provide a democratic alternative for the unevitable authoritarian tendency in state policy caused by the rise of populism. This type of social order should be understood in terms of arrangements of institutions and of tuning stakeholders to one another. Taking this longing for security among the population seriously means also to stop addressing civilians as consumers and start urging them to act like co-responsibles.