The Netherlands pursues an active policy of excluding and prosecuting potential perpetrators of international crimes. In recent years hundreds of people have been excluded from taking part in the asylum procedure. Bringing cases to court, however, has proven to be very difficult in practice. Most excluded persons reside illegally in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe. A good overview of the grounds upon which persons have been excluded and with what types of crimes they are associated is currently lacking. The Netherlands – actually the international community as a whole – still struggles with a number of legal and ethical issues. International law, for example, does not provide an adequate solution for some convicted excluded asylum seekers after their release.

During the Second World War, a large number of prisoners were put to work in concentration camps in order to contribute to the development of Germany. As this labour became more important in economic terms during the years 1939 to 1945, the death toll in the camps also rose during the same period. This contribution aims at providing insight into the apparent contradiction (paradox) between the practices of extermination on the one hand and the German economic interests on the other hand. Not only has historiography paid relatively little attention to this phenomenon (it is not a main topic), criminology has also remained remarkably silent during this debate. Looking at the ‘plantation’ in Dachau concentration camp (1937-1945) we develop an exploratory analysis of the subject. Using Vaughan’s organizational criminology, we discuss the paradox and address the question of the extent to which criminology can offer explanations for phenomena of this kind.

This article develops a victimological perspective on international criminal justice, based on a review of the main victimological characteristics of international crimes. These include the complicity or active involvement of government agencies, the large numbers of victims and the peculiar position of international crime victims who, at the time the crimes are committed, are usually not viewed as victims by the perpetrators, but placed outside the moral sphere or even depicted as perpetrators rather than victims.Key elements of this perspective concern the external coherence of the criminal justice reaction - the interlinking of criminal justice with other reparative efforts - as well as its internal coherence - the extent to which the procedures of international criminal justice are aligned with what it realistically can and should achieve. With internal coherence in mind, the article examines the victimological findings relating to the main rights of victims in the criminal procedure (recognition/acknowledgement, information/participation and compensation/reparation) and subsequently analyzes how the specifics of international crimes moderate them.

What do we know about the criminological aspects of international crimes? What do they entail and what are facilitating factors which can help us understand their causes and how should we respond to these crimes? Are international crimes merely a more extreme form of ordinary crimes or are they a different kind of criminality? In the past few years a growing number of scholars both at a national and at an international level have devoted their scholarly attention to this important and urgent research theme. In this special issue we aim to present a number of articles in which different perspectives on this topic are presented. By doing so we hope to enhance our knowledge of this phenomenon and to provide an impulse to further criminological research within this area in both the Netherlands and Belgium. This introductory article gives an overview of the state of the art of international crime criminology in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the rest of the world.

During the 1990s the Serbian government entered into a symbiotic relationship with criminals and paramilitary units which led to a normalization of crime and violence. While society usually inhibits people from criminal behavior, in Serbia this process was reversed. Propaganda contained the neutralization techniques that allowed people to condone and even approve of violent and criminal behavior. The reversal of the moral order became part of Serbia’s popular culture in which criminals who had committed many atrocities during the war, like Arkan, were honored. In this way, Arkan served not only a military and strategic purpose but also a political one, by generating support for the war.

In the current literature on child soldiers, many assumptions are made about the use of child soldiers worldwide. The duration of conflicts and thus increasing number of battle related deaths would influence the use of child soldiers. Another assumption is that child soldiers are mainly used in civil wars. In this article, these assumptions are tested empirically and the characteristics of conflicts in which child soldiers are used and conflicts in which they are not used are compared. However, conducting quantitative research on child soldiers is not easy. Many data are obtained through interviews and are based on unconfirmed reports and observations, which raises questions about how the data should be assessed. This study is an explorative study into the possibilities of testing some of the current assumptions.

This paper deals with the question of how a partly privatized security sector could be regulated. A central aim of this regulation should be the control of security as a public good. Three models of regulation are analyzed. The current practice of this regulation in the Netherlands shows a serious lack of effectiveness. One of our main conclusions is that neither the state nor the private sector is able to enforce this regulation on their own. However, it is assumed that the state should have a central and integrated regulatory role in this field, with more attention paid to the practical implementation of it, with the power and will to sanction private agencies if necessary. In addition managers of private security companies should adopt a role as public managers with a public moral duty. Regulation of security is faced with a double problematic, not only the horizontal fragmentation of the field, but also the vertical fragmentation, often resulting in a serious gap between managers and those in the field, both in the public and the private sector. This implies that the regulation should not only rest on the state and on self-regulation by the sector at management level, but also on the promotion of a practical ethic for security workers to steer and regulate their daily work.

The author provides a discussion of the articles in this issue of the Tijdschrift voor Veiligheid (Journal on Security) on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. He notes that there is an increasing hybridising, subjectification and fragmentation in the security area. The increasing interweaving of security politics seems to apply least to a common approach in ‘social security and physical safety issues’ (crime control and disaster and crisis management), while exactly this was aimed for in so-called integral security politics. According to the author that is the case because of ‘the moral pin’, which plays a dominant role in crime, but not in safety issues. The entanglement of forms of security identified by the author has a normative basis – it comes from the social order of an increasingly complex society. For the future an ever greater responsibilisation can be expected, in which the perception of security becomes even more important than it is now already. Not a big orchestrated security policy, but jazzy structures will then determine the prospects.

The concept of transnationalism refers to border-crossing activities and social relations, such as family relations, migration, international trade and international organisations. It is argued that transnationalism is an important topic in the sociology of law for three reasons: the transnationalisation of law (laws travel across borders), the law under transnationalism (transnational processes affect law) and classic socio-legal themes may gain a new and exciting lease of life when used in a transnational context. Transnationalism touches on the core of the sociology of law: studying the relation between law and society and the social working of law. Socio-legal scholars should look beyond the national borders, include non-state actors in their analysis and take notice of how rules are used in different localities.

In transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases, spouses can come into contact with two different legal systems. Many different kinds of organisations are involved, offering social and legal advice and aid in these transnational divorces: advising and referring clients, educating spouses and professionals, and influencing policy. In this article these organisations are analysed as participants in a transnational field of legal aid, using Moore’s concept of the semi-autonomous social field. It becomes clear that these organisations share norms on transnational divorce: they frame transnational divorce as a women’s problem, and one of complex, interacting rules and regulations. These norms form the source of rules on how to handle law in transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases.

In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.

In recent years, West European supermarkets have been playing an active role in the global regulation of food safety. They have developed several transnational food safety standards and compelled suppliers of food products around the world to acquire certification under these standards. Why and how did supermarkets do this? This article explores the emergence and evolution of transnational supermarket standards by analyzing the development of GlobalGAP, one of the most commonly implemented supermarket standards on farms throughout the world. In the literature, the emergence of transnational regulation is often attributed to one or two factors that play an important role at a particular moment in time. The main argument made in this article is that the emergence of transnational supermarket standards is best understood when it is studied as a process. The development of GlobalGAP includes four main characteristics which may be helpful in analyzing the emergence of other transnational private standards.

This paper presents a reflection on the theoretical work on the social working of law of the past two decades. It is argued that early assumptions, that legal models were becoming increasingly globalised, creating an increasingly uniform body of law, have not come true. The global spread of neo-capitalism has not only given rise to de-juridification, it has also engendered juridification in which ever more sectors of social life, from small scale to global, are being colonised by law. This development is initiated from above and below in equal measure, and concerns not only the law of nation states, but also law created by other actors, including religious law of various provenance. The paper argues that great progress has been made in understanding how transnational law is generated and how law is transnationalised, but that the ways in which these processes work when actors actually use this transnationalised law in contexts of legal pluralism are not yet adequately understood. The paper presents a perspective on transnationalisation of law that is grounded in space, a perspective that may aid our understanding of the social working of law in transnational contexts. The first section provides a brief survey of some of the main academic approaches to processes of transnationalisation. The second section addresses the issue of location and considers what happens in settings where actors use transnationalising law. The conclusions discuss the value of transnational space and transnational legal space as concepts for the analysis of transnationalising law.

Transnationalism and migration are recognised contributors to legal pluralism. Scholars of legal pluralism state that in conflicts, social actors sustain their claims with arguments from coexisting legal systems. They manoeuvre between different legal systems, or contradicting norms within one system, to achieve the most satisfactory decision in a conflict. In doing so, they use norms as discursive tools. Indeed, according to data on domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, this manoeuvring with norms as discursive tools is often recognisable in conflicts between workers and their employers. However, transnational contractual norms and the legal pluralism they create are not merely discursive tools in existing conflicts; they are also regularly the cause of conflicts. Domestic workers conclude agreements with agents in their countries of origin, while employers conclude agreements with different agents in the destination countries. Both parties believe the other party has signed the same contract, while in reality that is not the case. Because of the differences between the two sets of contractual norms, these norms cause conflicts; they are not merely discursive tools. This finding calls for a division between different types of conflicts, which is proposed here for the purpose of socio-legal analysis of conflicts in general and particularly in situations of transnationalism and legal pluralism.

For a common market, a common patent and a common patent litigation seem self-evident. Although efforts to introduce these common market institutions in Europe started early in the history of the Economic Community, they remained unsuccessful. The reconstruction of this legal history is focused on two theoretical issues.The first concerns the question of power and influence in the EU, in particular the configuration of stakeholders responsible for the non-decision making on this policy issue. The basic mechanism underlying the lack of success of this dossier appears to be a balance of power between the two opposing groups of stakeholders (France and European institutions vs. Germany, UK, supported by their patenting industry and legal experts). This suggests that transnational rule making, proceeding under similar conditions, is likely to have a long (if not unsuccessful) ‘issue career’.The second theoretical issue concerns the agenda-setting mechanisms of recent decades. All initiatives on international or transnational patent policy have mainly been the product of ‘high politics’, although the input of patent legal experts (representatives of ‘low politics’) has increased considerably in recent decades. Further, this history would seem to defy simple schemes of agenda setting. There is no simple sequence of issue initiation, specification, expansion and entrance. At best, it is a series of such sequences.

The position of victims of crime has shown marked improvement over the past 30 years. The rise of the victim has been associated with the growth of a unified ‘victim movement’; a social movement that strives to improve the position of victims of crime. However, it is questionable whether the victim movement should be viewed as a unitary phenomenon. Instead of one movement, there appear to be a number of victim movements. There are differences between the victim advocates in the United States, Victim Support in Europe, the violence against women movement and proponents of restorative justice.. In this article, reasons for these differences are sought in victim-endogenous factors: differences in victims’ characteristics and the idealtypes employed by the different movements are an important explanation for the divergent development in organisations representing victims interests, which in turn influences their policy preferences. It is argued that advocates of restorative justice would benefit from understanding both the reality and the distortion involved in the idealtypes, including their own. This would allow proponents of restorative justice to adapt their practices in a manner that is both suitable and convincing to the representative and target group of the different victim movements.

This contribution explores how much state is necessary to make societal constitutionalism work. I first ask why the idea of a global societal constitutionalism ‘beyond the state-and-politics’ might be viewed as a significant and controversial, but nonetheless justified innovation. In the second part I discuss what Teubner calls ‘the inclusionary effects of fundamental rights’. I argue that Teubner underplays the mediating role of the state in guaranteeing inclusion or access, and in a way presupposes well-functioning states in the background. In areas of limited statehood there is a problem of enforcing fundamental rights law. It is an open question whether, and under which conditions, constitutional norms within particular global social spheres can provide enough counter-weight when state constitutional norms are lacking.