In this article Tom Daems and René van Swaaningen discuss work and life of the late Dutch historian Pieter Spierenburg. The article is based on an interview the authors conducted with Spierenburg in November 2018 as well as his published work and excerpts of an unpublished biography. The article discusses in particular themes related to his interest in, and contributions to, the history of crime and punishment, in particular Spierenburg’s path-breaking book The Spectacle of Suffering (1984), his relation to Norbert Elias and the Amsterdam School and his critique of Michel Foucault.

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.

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.

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).