This article tries to show how populism is taking issue with the Gnostic tendency in present-day politics Eric Voegelin had been identifying as ‘the immanentization of the eschaton’. According to populists modern Gnosticism is trying to realize the eschaton at the expense of one or more elements of reality that, according to Voegelin, had been identified in Christian culture during the course of its history, namely God and cosmos, society and men. This article elaborates on this argument by indicating how populists are used to positioning themselves over against Gnostics in the political debates on gender, immigration, climate change and the European Union.

In recent years, it has often been suggested that the CDA, and to a lesser extent the ChristenUnie (CU) and the Staatkundig Gereformeerde Partij (SGP), are losing voters to right-wing populist parties. To examine this proposition, the article first looks at which ‘Christian voters’ would be inclined to vote for right-wing populist parties. Next, a comparison is made between the positions of Forum voor Democratie (FvD), the Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV) and JA21 and Christian parties, with respect to issues that are important to Christian voters. An analysis of the various election programmes for the 2021 parliamentary elections shows that while there is overlap between Christian and right-wing populist parties when it comes to limits on religious freedom and moral issues, there also remain significant differences and shared positions are often underpinned by very different arguments.

Xenophobic tendencies in the migration discourse in the EU are thought to make asylum seekers and irregular migrants more vulnerable for hate crimes by individuals or groups. In a similar vein, migration control measures are said to be associated with the increase in xenophobia and hate crimes against these migrants. This article discusses the possible relationships between the process of crimmigration and hate crimes against migrants in the EU.

In 1938, Nico (or Niko) Gunzburg founded the Institute of Criminology at Ghent University.
Because he was a professor of Jewish origin, Flemish-minded, a political liberal and a freemason, he became the victim, in 1940 and in 1941, of looting by the ‘Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg für die besetzten Gebiete’. Personal books, documents, art and archives concerning his lodge ‘Marnix van Sint Aldegonde’ were stolen from his house and transported to nazi-Germany. After the Second World War, almost the entire collection was found in the Moscow-Archive and subject to restitution.

Racism is related to the process of ‘othering’. Individual people or groups can be described as ‘other’ by depicting them as ‘beasts’. In another form of othering accusations of maltreatment of other than human animals play an important role: awful people abuse innocent animals. Next to that concepts like ‘genocide’ and ‘slavery’ are nowadays used in order to describe the way humans treat other animals. All of this influences the debate on racism.

Tegenwoordig bestaat meer aandacht voor burgers die om uiteenlopende redenen niet goed in staat zijn om zich aan juridische normen te houden, in het bijzonder ook aan strafrechtelijke normen. Het gaat om mensen wier cognitieve vermogens tekortschieten en/of die een onderontwikkeld vermogen van zelfcontrole hebben. Deze ontwikkeling kan worden beschouwd als een zekere mate van erkenning dat de maatschappij – en de overheid in het bijzonder – medeverantwoordelijk is voor het scheppen van de bestaansvoorwaarden waaronder mensen zich kunnen ontplooien tot verantwoordelijke burgers. In dit artikel betoog ik dat deze gedeelde verantwoordelijkheid niet alleen geldt voor de ontwikkeling van de mentale capaciteiten die nodig zijn om de normen van het recht te kunnen volgen, maar ook voor het bieden van toegang aan burgers tot de materiële normen zelf.

De auteurs onderzoeken aan de hand van de jurisprudentie hoe de toekenning van hoge schadevergoedingen wegens onrechtmatige perspublicaties zich verhoudt met de vrijheid van meningsuiting. In dat verband besteden zij aandacht aan het zogenoemde chilling effect. Ook komt aan de orde hoe de rechter omgaat met hoge schadevergoedingen in het buitenland.

Na de bevrijding ontstond al snel het beeld dat ‘de’ Nederlanders zich tijdens de oorlog heldhaftig hadden verzet tegen de Jodenvervolging en het nationaalsocialistische onrecht. De naoorlogse berichten over de moord op meer dan 102.000 Nederlandse Joden brachten dit zelfbeeld nauwelijks aan het wankelen. Dat werd anders, toen in de jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw bleek dat de nazi’s gedurende de Tweede Wereldoorlog uit geen enkel land in West-Europa zo veel Joden hadden gedeporteerd en omgebracht als uit Nederland. Deze bijdrage staat stil bij het verzet van Nederlandse juristen tegen onrechtvaardig recht, in het bijzonder tegen de antisemitische maatregelen.

This article focuses on the ways the NVU, Pegida and Voorpost - three far-right groups from the Netherlands - make use of social media platforms in the year 2017. Our results show that these extreme right-wing groups use social media to spread their ideology, to construct a group identity, and to call for (democratic) forms of resistances. In addition, our findings illustrate that these far-right groups seem to adjust to their digital surroundings: they do not change or conceal their extremist ideas, but rather manage their online content to ensure that their ideologies can be disseminated through social media.

About half (54%) of Dutch mental health care have patients who radicalize. This delivery room for radical losers deserves more attention. The GGZ will then have to emerge from the stalled discourse, that radicalization is not a psychiatric disorder. An important breeding ground for these and other ‘delivery rooms’ are apart from factors like social and psychological influences, and grievances about social, economic and health inequalities (Bhui et al., 2014), the wars that are initiated annually by the United States from 1798, with or without the help of the United Kingdom, the European Union and therefore the Netherlands. This article argues that ‘fire should not be fired with fire’. It is argued for the implementation of Activism of Hope (Lleshi, 2018) with its own grandfathers, such as Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Finally, an action perspective for all young people in the tumultuous phase of adolescence is proposed for education- and care institutions.

Early literature on female perpetrators of World War II focused on labelling the accused as deranged psychopaths, thereby distinguishing the group of perpetrators from the vast subdued and ‘normal’ population. While this perception has changed over the past decades, the perception of female perpetrators has remained limited either way, women are denied having a lot of agency when perpetrating crimes in conflict. Similar to the ‘mad Nazi’-theory these narratives imply that female perpetrators are different from ‘ordinary’ women, as their actions collide with notions of ideal femininity. This empirical research has shown that in the case of female perpetrators of World War II in the Netherlands it seems that they can be seen as ordinary women operating in extraordinary circumstances. In this study, a special group of female war criminals is described. Against the background of early post-war imaging of such women and more recent research on female perpetration during wartime, an analysis of Dutch perpetrators who received severe punishments after the War, is made. Based on unique historical data, the criminal career of these women as World War II perpetrators is analysed. The outcomes show that a notable part already had a criminal record before the war and that the perception of who they were and why they acted the way they did needs reconsideration, since they were not psychologically weak and incompetent. They were generally young, unemployed and low educated and they planned and committed their crimes of treasons in order to create better living conditions for themselves. In fact, one can claim that these women are likely to be ordinary people influenced by dispositional and situational factors.

Criminology traditionally focuses on the human experience. However, several criminologists have seriously criticized this anthropocentric perspective. In their view from a criminological perspective humans and other than human animals should be given equal attention. Although they advocate a non-speciesist criminology, they are not trying to fundamentally change criminology as we know it. Instead, their appeal is to not consider other than human creatures as passive objects and solely from the perspective of their usefulness for humans. Yet, this objective poses substantial methodological challenges to criminologists.

Most state-corporate crime research is focused on crime or harmful outcomes in or by democratic states. The goal of this article is to investigate the applicability of this concept to relations between economic actors and non-democratic state actors. The concept of state-corporate crime is applied to three contexts in which corporations have become involved in international crimes such as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Each representing a turning point in the academic and public perception of ‘business and human rights’, the contexts that are analysed are Nazi Germany (1993-1945), Apartheid South Africa (1948-1994) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC; 1996-now). It is concluded that in non-democratic states with totalitarian of authoritarian regimes (such as Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa), the concept of state-corporate crime is applicable and explanatory. In such strong states, economic and state actors make use of mutual benefits while, on the whole, state-interests prevail. As a result, the harmful outcome of the dynamics between corporations and states can best be described as corporate facilitated state crime. In weak states (such as the DRC) economic actors are generally more powerful while their involvement in international crimes also runs via non-state actors. The blurred lines between economic actors and state actors (and their interests) makes it difficult to apply the concept, in its different forms, to state-corporate cooperation in weak states and ‘new’ wars.

In februari 2018 heeft de Poolse senaat een nieuwe wet aangenomen die het illegaal maakt om Polen te beschuldigen van medeplichtigheid bij de vervolging van Joodse burgers tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog. De Poolse regering wil met name een einde maken aan de verwijzingen naar ‘Poolse concentratiekampen’ en de Poolse rol in de ondersteuning van Duits beleid tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

The article examines the public debate about New Year’s Eve in Cologne in 2015. Theoretical starting point is the idea that public debates are forms of social communication in which reality is produced and social events become meaningful. On the basis of a framing analysis, it is investigated what significance New Year’s Eve in Cologne has as a medial event for society. The question here is how the event is described and explained, how it is mentioned and interpreted, what significance it collectively receives and how these insights can be theoretically interpreted. The analysis shows that different frames were possible, such as the problematization of the work of the police. Instead, the discourse focused on the sexual behaviour of refugees and securitization and sexualisation of migration takes place.

Appeals to religion in the public domain, in particular by politicians, prove to be controversial. This is good news, given that the ensuing debate usually uncovers forgotten aspects of religious traditions. Using three cases from the Dutch political discourse, to wit: the appeal to ‘Jewish Christian’ tradition, the claim that Jewish Christian tradition has been of key emancipatory value, and the identification of immigrants as religious, and applying Aleida Assmann’s theory about the dynamics of forgetting (and remembrance), the paper demonstrates that in each of these cases, the public debates surrounding these instances of references to religion and their rhetorical use, were instrumental in uncovering ‘forgotten’ aspects of religion that had disappeared from the ‘memory’ of the political discourse.