Sexualized graffiti has emerged on walls in Brussels since the beginning of 2013, generating fierce debates. Perceived as street art and a welcome challenge to heteropatriarchy by some and as obscenity and vulgarity by others, these pieces highlight the inherently contested character of public spaces. The controversies around the presence of these paintings in public space relate to what in the literature has become known as moral geographies, that is, the spatial aspect of morality. What should one do about these supposed ‘porn’ pieces: regulate their existence and control potential tensions and conflicts, or let frictions emerge between the partisans and the opponents of such urban interventions? Who gets to say what should be tolerated and what should be regulated in public space? In this opinion piece, I situate this issue between two ends: an agonistic one, in which contestation is the rule; and an excessively regulatory one, in which public space is over-rationalized and normalized.

In The Netherlands not much attention has been paid towards the relationship between domestic violence and organized crime. In this contribution the question is addressed why this is. One of the answers is that there is doubt about the moral status of the victim of organized crime: it assumed that the victim has benefited from the proceedings of organized crime. When domestic violence and involvement with organized crime by one of the family members come together, the case becomes more complex and difficult to deal with. For that reason professionals and researchers should pay more attention to the overlap of both phenomena.

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.

During the recent ‘refugee crisis’, governments have been confronted with various problems concerning asylum reception. In several locations in the Netherlands, as well as elsewhere in Europe and beyond, new local forms of experimenting around the issue of asylum reception have begun. One example is Utrecht’s ‘Plan Einstein’. In Overvecht, a district of the city, an office building has been converted into an asylum shelter, where 400 asylum seekers live together with 38 non-refugee youngsters from Utrecht. The Centre runs courses and activities, offered to both asylum seekers (including those who do not yet have a residence status) and local residents. Employing the concepts of ‘multilevel governance’ and ‘experimental governance’, this article indicates why this initiative was able to be realized at this location and at this time.

This paper links the discussion on superdiversity and its call for multidimensional shifts in migration patterns and the ‘diversification of diversity’ this has led to, to the development of immigrant integration policies that tend to focus on traditional migrant groups. Considered from the superdiversity perspective these groups are an simplification of the diversity within and between the migrant population. Furthermore, the diversification of the society as a whole calls into question who should be targeted for immigrant integration policies at all, and in what direction they should point, in a society that has changed itself as a consequence of immigration (Crul, 2016). How do these questions speak to the world of immigrant integration policy making? This paper links this question to the trend of ‘mainstreaming’ in immigrant integration governance. Across Europe traditional immigrant integration policies have been replaced by universal policies, generic policies, targeted at the entire population, such as broad city-citizenship approaches or incorporating former immigrant integration policies in generic educational or community policies. This paper discusses material from different European cases between 2000-2014 to explore whether this broad, mainstreaming approach can be considered a policy-answer to the questions and challenges the superdiversity discussion raises for immigrant integration policies.

In this article I discuss one of the latest reports on the practice of drone warfare, the UN SRCT Drone Inquiry. I use the report to illustrate some of the specific forms of legal politics that surround drone warfare today. In the first place, I focus on the tension between the capacity of drones to target more precisely and the never-ending critique that drone warfare victimizes civilian populations. Secondly, I focus on the call for more objective legal rules that can be found in many debates on drone warfare.