Genocide is so cruel and extreme that a first natural reflex is to distance ourselves from the perpetrators and qualify them as deranged criminals, psychopaths and sadists – very different from us ordinary people. Although some of the perpetrators fit this description, most perpetrators are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances who commit so-called crimes of obedience. A genocidal regime is usually led by a criminal mastermind, who is supported by a number of fanatics and opportunistic careerists who take advantage of the situation to make themselves a career. Many of these perpetrators are special cases who deliberately participated in the genocide. Perpetrators in the middle cadre as well as the rank and file members are however often very ordinary people who just go along and follow the flow out of ideological conviction, fear or material gain.

This article is about the ability of human beings to make a deliberate choice to do evil. Punishing evildoers according to penal law presupposes that they are responsible for their acts, i.e. that they acted out of free will. In the first part I recall the origins of the classical nexus between free will, responsibility and punishment in Christian theology and scholastic philosophy. Then I analyze the philosophies of Sade and Nietzsche in order to demonstrate how the traditional conception of good and evil can be inverted. Sades extreme moral relativism and Nietzsches radical perspectivism open the gates for a justification of moral evil. In the final part I look at the serial killer as an actor who deliberately chooses to do evil. The personality disorder (psychopathy) of most serial killers probably affects their inhibition to harm others. But although their lack of empathy can lower the threshold for harming others, this (mostly) does not annihilate their moral responsibility. Such can be exemplified by the fact that many serial killers are acting in an extremely strategic, opportunistic and deceitful way in order to ensure the persistence of their deliberate choice to do evil. Moreover, some serial killers, when justifying their behavior, engage in arguments putting into perspective ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in a way that is reminiscent of Sade and Nietzsche.

The central question of this contribution is whether slavery was considered in the Netherlands at the time as something normal, an argument which is often heard in debates about this phenomenon today. This paper shows that during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, slavery was indeed something that happened far away from home, however, all the time voices could be heard in this country opposing at least the cruelties of the slave system, or even the basic incompatability of slavery and christianity. It even turned out to be a public problem with the hundreds of enslaved people who came over time with their owners from Suriname or the Dutch Antilles to this country, and after a while became free citizens, because in the Netherlands itself slavery was not allowed.
During the second part of the eighteenth century in literary and political Dutch circles the individual voices against (the cruelties of) slavery turned more or less into a choir. These opponents of the system were obviously influenced by and often fervent supporters of the Enlightenment and its ideals for mankind of freedom, equality and brotherhood. Eventually, however, in 1797 the revolutionary Dutch National Assembly in its first constitution voted against an article meant to abolish slave trade and slavery in the near future. It took more than two generations to finally settle this question in 1863.

The Classical Paradigm considers evil intentions as a necessary element of human evil, for instance the Holocaust. The Obedience Paradigm states that the main motive of the perpetrators of this evil was obedience to authority. The Ideology Paradigm argues that ideological motives were the main element. This paper tries to show that it is impossible to separate obedience and ideology in the motives of perpetrators like Adolf Eichmann and Otto Ohlendorf. These perpetrators were also conscious of the fact that they violated moral and legal norms. In that sense they had evil intentions and can be held responsible for their crimes.

The recent exhibition The Crime Was Almost Perfect in the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, curated by Cristina Ricupero, focused on the dynamic relation between art (aesthetics) and crime (ethics). The review discusses the representations of crime in (some of) the exhibited art works and analyzes the ways in which the artists play with their (conflicting) meanings, ambivalences and ambiguities.

In this interview, Contantijn Kelk talks about his life and career in criminal law and the relationship between his work and the fine arts. More specifically, he talks about his friendship with the painter Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) who, like he himself, in his work demonstrated compassion and solidarity with the suspected, convicted and detained fellow human being.

Cultural criminology has shown an interest in the visual representation of perpetrators, victims and scenes of crime and punishment in the media. Relatively little attention has been paid to the visual representation of these subjects in the fine arts, however. This lacuna has been the inspiration for this special issue about the art of representation and the relationship between fine arts and criminology. Questions that are addressed include: What is the importance and meaning of representational art for the criminologist? It is conceivable that a criminological researcher would reformulate his or her research problem due to insights that have been articulated by artists? And, by the same token, is it possible that an artist would revise his or her representation because of scientific research? Or, are the doings of both independent of one another? Ultimately, this special issue is concerned with how representations of perpetrators, victims and scenes of crime and punishment come into being, which meaning these images have in different social and cultural contexts and what we, as criminologists, can contribute to them.

Life of a Hunter (c.1647) is an extraordinary painting by the young Dutch artist Paulus Potter. Its fourteen panels tell the tale of a well-heeled gentleman who likes to hunt and to kill “game” and “exotic” animals. The hunting world is turned upside down when the animals capture the hunter and put him on trial. He is condemned to death, roasted alive and doubtless consumed by the very creatures who had earlier been his quarry. In this essay we try to interpret Potter’s painting. Is it an allegory of the chaotic politics of the mid-17th century Dutch Republic? Does it represent an early modern animal trial? Our tentative conclusion is that Life of a Hunter expresses a Montaignian-inspired moment of transition in cultural attitudes towards human-animal relationships: its restricted vision of animal cruelty is not against animal cruelty tout court and its inversion of two links in the great chain of being is very far from being altogether pro-animal.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the process of rupture in Brazilian graffiti writer’s subculture resulting in different groups - pichadores, pixadores and grafiteiros - took place in two different, though complementary, stages. The first stage is the commodification of graffiti by successive media campaigns and its penal control by the state. The second stage - which may be considered as a side effect of the first one - consists of the emergence of a new transgressive pixação movement. Instead of merely writing or tagging their signatures and messages on the walls of the city, they claim the freedom of usage of the urban space and contest the importance that property has in the late modernity context.

An analysis is made of how the painting The Kleptomaniac (2005) by Marlene Dumas – especially through its title – represents a certain kind of criminal and what ethical implications this has. A discussion of art historical research on the genesis of the original Portrait of a kleptomaniac (ca. 1820) from which Dumas has taken the title for her painting, is followed by a discussion of the history of the concept of kleptomania in psychiatry and an analysis of how that concept is reproduced by Dumas’ painting and, in particular, its title: The Kleptomaniac. By giving a painting of a male face this title in 2005 a type of criminal is represented in a way that does not do justice to the history of the concept and the phenomenon itself. By mobilizing a contested and obsolete psychiatric concept for an artistic project, the ambiguity which the painter intended is not left intact but, in fact, destroyed by an allusive title which mystifies the subject while having a disorienting effect on the viewer of the painting.

Vagabonds, mainly relating to beggars and vagrants, have occupied the Western European social and criminal landscape by the ages. In this contribution some long term patterns – from the Middle Ages onwards – are investigated. The central questions are a) What is the place vagabonds occupied in society? and b) How was dealt with them in the past centuries? In order to answer these questions the perception of and the distinction between true and false beggars and vagrants are included. In addition to penal and criminological sources also those from the visual arts (history) are applied. Answering these questions shows a process of increasing institutionalization seeing a pattern of social exclusion to institutional confinement. An important role in the institutionalization is reserved for the interference of criminal law.

In the introduction of the special issue of the Journal on Crime & Culture on ‘Resistance’, the editors focus on the theoretical history of the concept of resistance in the field of Criminology. Against the background of the Birmingham School and the themes and ideas of Critical Criminology, the authors argue that new issues are rebelled against, and new styles and rituals become en vogue. The street fighting man on the barricades is no longer the obvious icon, and resistance is not per se intergenerational, interclass or a confrontation between minorities and mainstream culture. Resistance may have epidemic proportions as the Arabic Spring. Movements like Occupy or WikiLeaks operate across borders, but resistance also includes subtle transgressions within organizations.

Subcultural theory and cultural criminology have traditionally viewed ‘underground’ youth movements as providing images of deviance/resistance which the cultural industries harvest to turn a profit. The logic follows that street and sub cultures imbue products with a ‘transgressive edge’ that increases their appeal within youth markets. This paper uses the example of UK ‘grime’ music to demonstrate how this dynamic cannot be viewed as applying universally in contemporary times. Where their street orientated content is censured, many grime artistes express a desire for commercial success which would ultimately emerge through muting their rhetorical links to crime and violence and explicitly championing ‘mainstream’ values. This case is used as an empirical cue to explore the use and critique of the concept of ‘resistance’ within cultural criminology and subcultural theory. The paper problematizes commodification of resistance discourses as they apply to the rugged culture of the streets and indeed its supposed ‘oppositional’ character where disadvantaged urban youth clearly embody and practice the logic of neoliberalism. It furthermore suggests that certain critiques of cultural criminology go too far in denying any meaning to criminality and subcultural practice beyond consumer desire. Ultimately, the concept of ‘defiance’ is suggested as a useful tool to understand the norms of and behaviours of the excluded.

Recent scientific literature and media focus on new styles, rituals and instruments in the phenomena of social disorder and resistance. People fight for new issues, in changing in/out group settings, with social media as a means to an end that often is not so obvious from the start. The various, dynamic local contexts define how and why these new ambitions and techniques become trenchant.From a long term perspective patterns and appearances do change, but (perceived) distributive injustice and procedural injustice remain the key drivers motivating social disorder and resistance. Feeding on recent studies about the immediate aftermath of the Second World War (1945), the Arab Spring (2010-2011), and the British ‘Summer of Discontent’ (2011), this article reconsiders the question: what’s new?

The politization of the concept of genocide by Western states has been severely criticised, because it has led to an impunity for genocidal crimes. In certain instances however, such criticism has contributed to the dynamic of victimization, instead of resisting it. The article discusses how Professor Edward S. Herman and journalist David Peterson’s staunch criticism of the politics of genocide amounts to a brazen denial of the genocide against the Tutsi which recycles much of the extremist discourse of the former Rwandan authorities that were implicated in genocide. In this case Herman and Peterson’s resistance against the politics of genocide has profound implications, several of which the article will address.

This article provides a theoretical analysis of the label ‘resistance’. It sets out from the premise that the notion of resistance, although it has been current in criminology for some time, is still vaguely defined. We argue that resistance is not just a negative term, but can also be seen as a positive and creative force in society. As such, the primary function of resistance is to serve as a solvent of doxa, to continuously question obviousness and common sense. In the process of resistance we distinguish three processes: invention, imitation and transformation. The third stage warrants deeper investigation within cultural criminology.