Hesdy Gerges is a heavyweight kickboxer whose career was interrupted because of his involvement in an cocaine transport. This article is analyzes the biography of this top fighter, describing the macro context of an expanding market for full-contact martial arts, the meso level of the gym and its relation to the criminal milieu, and the fighter and his body on the micro level. Hesdy is used to set an example, and since it takes more than seven years to reach a verdict, the impact on his private life and his career as a fighter is large. The study is based on participant observation and 33 interviews, twenty of which with the protagonist.

The overexploitation of nature has led to anthropogenic defaunation, which results in complex socioeconomic, political and ecological consequences. Influenced by the economic growth of modernization and the interconnectedness of globalization, zoonotic diseases emerge as incalculable side effects of defaunation. By rejecting anthropocentric worldviews, this article critically examines anthropogenic defaunation and the causes and consequences of the coronavirus pandemic from a green criminological perspective.

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.

Changing ecological conditions in a globalizing world pose new challenges for human societies. Global warming, large-scale pollution, deforestation and species extinction have increasingly become topics on the international agenda. Even though many of these harmful activities are criminogenic, criminology pays rather little attention to environmental crimes and harms.
Therefore, this article discusses the anthropocentric perspective within criminology and argues that a non-anthropocentric criminology can lead to new theoretical insights.

The two editors of this issue conducted an interview with professor emeritus International law and Human Rights Theo van Boven. Van Boven was UN Special Rapporteur against Torture and he served as Director of Human Rights of the United Nations. In these and his other positions, Van Boven fought for the rights of victims of gross human rights violations and throughout his career he experienced first-hand how regimes try to cover up and deny their crimes. The interview focuses on his experiences with the former military junta in Argentina. Van Boven notes that in comparison to other regimes, the junta had developed the most sophisticated strategy of denial. Van Boven reflects on the regime’s vocabulary of denial, the political dimensions of denial and the implications for the victims. He is open and sincere about his experiences as Director of Human Rights of the United Nations and explains how victim rights, such as the right to truth, can clash with the bureaucratic and political reality within the United Nations.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within Dutch civil society provide material and immaterial assistance to unauthorized migrants in the Netherlands. Based on long-term qualitative fieldwork in the life worlds of unauthorized migrants, the authors describe how the migrants experience these NGOs as a safe haven where they feel at home and secure for the risks of apprehension and deportation. We argue that these safe havens are also beneficial for the society at large. These NGOs contribute to preventing unauthorized migrants from sleeping in public places and employing illegitimate survival strategies. In addition, the NGOs’ empowerment of these migrants is advantageous for their willingness to access healthcare and employ legal rights. Recent attempts of the Dutch government to restrict the number of these NGOs, lead amongst other things to NGOs who are increasingly focusing on the unauthorized migrants’ return. We argue that these governmental efforts of controlling unauthorized migration through NGOs, will result in unauthorized migrants loosing trust in these safe havens. Ultimately, this governmental control through NGOs will have a negative impact on feelings of security in the society at large as it fundamentally diminishes the significance of these NGOs in civil society for unauthorized migrants without offering an alternative.

Criminology has come under the spell of thinking negatively about safety and security. It’s focus merely lies on themes such as control, punishment and exclusion. Much interest therefore goes to public policing, private security, CCTV camera’s, anti-social behaviour orders, gated communities and prisons. Of course, this definition of security and security governance as the protection of citizens against crime and disorder must not be rejected out of hand. Without a minimum level of security, society would fall apart in chaos and despair. At the same time, however, we feel increasingly uncomfortable about the dominance of current negative – control and risk-oriented – approaches to (in)security as they overlook positive interpretations associated with trust, community and care. This introduction therefore provides an overview of academic literature that nuance, counter or resist hegemonic and negative meanings of security. In so doing, our aim is to introduce a positive turn in criminology’s interests and concerns regarding crime and disorder problems.

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.

Until approximately 1995, the Netherlands had a very low prison rate compared to the surrounding countries. David Downes, who made a comparison between the Dutch and the British penal policy, choose as a title for his book: Contrasts in Tolerance. He attributed the differences between England & Wales and the Netherlands, partly to the tolerant culture in the Netherlands compared to England & Wales (Downes, 1985: 69 e.v.). What exactly did he mean by tolerance in this context and in how far can this characteristic of Dutch penal policy explain the recent downfall of the Dutch prison population.

The current phase in which Dutch government increasingly criminalizes the illegal residence of migrants is simultaneously characterized by decreasing numbers of illegal migrants in this country. In the process of crimmigration, some newly developed policies indirectly influence daily lives of specific groups of illegal migrants while other policies and laws more directly try to hinder illegal stay. These policies that aim to exclude and ban illegal migrants are continued even though they are increasingly criticized by academics and divergent (inter)national actors. These policies and laws can be contradictory, sometimes conflict with international treaties, and lead to unforeseen and undesirable outcomes in which human dignity is challenged.

Desire for safety, security, community, and ‘niceness’, as well as wanting to live near people like themselves because of a fear of ‘others’ and of crime, is expressed by most residents living in gated communities. The emergence of a fortress mentality and its phenomenal success is surprising in the United States where the majority of people live in open and unguarded neighborhoods. Thus, the rapid increase in the numbers of Americans moving to secured residential enclaves invites a more complex account of their motives and values. While their reasoning is largely the same as other middle class Americans, these seemingly self-evident explanations encompass deeper meanings and concerns. This article reviews the consequences of living in a gated community based on resident interviews, behavioral mapping, and participant observation field notes. I begin with a history of gating and then use ethnographic examples to summarize what I learned. I conclude with a discussion of ‘community’ as it is being re-conceived through a discourse of fear of crime in the United States through private governance and gating, and outline what we can do to ameliorate its negative aspects.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than forty White South Africans in a middle class neighborhood of Cape Town, this paper looks at the motivations to secure South African houses and neighbourhoods with perimeter walls, security initiatives and neighbourhood watches. The discourses of the residents make it clear that seemingly banal actions to secure the residential environment are motivated as much by the fear of falling property prices and the fear of losing psychological comfort as they are driven by the high levels of crime and fear of crime.

An analysis of about 2,200 cases of homicides in the Netherlands committed between 1992 and 2006 shows that lethal violence typically results from conflict in symmetric relations in which social rank is ambiguous. The settings of homicides are mostly well-integrated, small communities, including families, rural villages in tribal and agrarian societies, modern urban neighbourhoods, gettos, criminal organisations, and ethnic enclaves. The mechanism that drives antagonism between people in such places is their attachment, close-knit structure, and common features. Earlier, Simmel developed this insight in lethal conflict when saying ‘the more we have in common with another as whole persons, the more easily will our totality be involved in every single relationship to that person, hence the disproportionate violence to which normally well-controlled people can be moved within their relations to those closest to them.’ Contemporary sociologists, ethnographers, and historians amply corroborated this view of lethal violence. In his comparative work Gould shows a compelling connection between ambiguity of social rank and lethal conflict. Knauft investigated the high homicide rates in a New Guinea community and found that lethal violence resulting from sorcery attributions is not the anti-thesis of the ideal of ‘good company’ but its ultimate culmination.

This article discusses tropical deforestation from a cultural criminological perspective, by using qualitative methods such as ethnography and interviews, and by emphasizing the difficulties, dangers and dilemmas of ethnographic research. Case studies include timber smuggling from Indonesia to Malaysia and deforestation for bauxite, soy and timber in Brazil’s Amazon. Also described are meetings with (Dutch) timber traders, policy makers and law enforcers. Tropical deforestation is responsible for a great deal of harm, crime and violence, mainly committed by ranchers and loggers. Victims are humans (including humanity’s oldest societies), future generations (considering the impact on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change) and non-humans (with risks of extinctions).