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.

From its beginning in 2002, the Dutch Journal of Safety Studies (JSS) has wanted to be a platform for Dutch and Belgian academic articles about all facets of safety and security. Furthermore the journal wants to be a platform for multidisciplinary articles in which safety and security issues are studied from different and complementary perspectives or academic fields.This article provides a content analysis of all 129 JSS-articles. The analysis shows that the focus of JSS is on matters of social safety (and less on the more ‘technical’ safety issues) and on the organization of safety (functioning of organizations or networks and/or the effectiveness of measures) and less on safety as such. Over the years, a few changes have taken place. (1) In the field of social safety the focus has shifted somewhat from ‘the organization of safety’ towards safety as such. (2) Although the proportion of articles from Belgium is small (5,4%), it has increased over the years. (3) Authors from Dutch universities of applied sciences have published no more than 4 articles (3,1%), the first one of which appeared in Volume 6. After some years, these authors discovered the JSS as a platform for their work.JSS covers a wide range of subjects in the field of safety and how it can be organized. Although most articles stem from criminology and/or public management, JSS contains articles from different academic fields such as criminology, communication, law, psychology, engineering, public management, medical science, etc. However, in one and the same article one does not often find a combination of really different academic perspectives, such as engineering and psychology or informatics and criminology. If the JSS aims to be a truly multidisciplinary journal, it should contain more articles of this kind over the next ten years.

Internal and external security are traditionally considered to be distinct concepts that allow police organizations and tasks to be differentiated from those of the military. Internal security is then viewed as oriented towards the maintenance of the order within a state and to be exercised against fellow citizens with a limited use of violence. External security deals with the protection of the territory and is exercised against foreign enemies, may include the use of excessive violence. In practice, however, the boundaries between these concepts and between police and military aims and tasks have become blurred. The extension of the security concept, a change in the nature of interventions on foreign territory and a shifting image of the enemy create an overlap between internal and external security issues and actors. This evolution seriously challenges the existing legal and normative frameworks that rely heavily on assumptions based on the distinction between internal and external security.

This article describes and judges the complex and often contradictory dynamic by which boundaries are constructed and transgressed. This dynamic reveals much about power, meaning, and the political economy of crime and control. The author describes the project undertaken by Critical Mass riders and precarity activists. These projects explore the possibilities of drift as collective experience and collective transgression. The pervasiveness of drift in contemporary society, paired with the subversive cultures of drift emerging around new social movements and alternative spatial practices, point toward a new kind of global collectivity.

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).

In the introduction to this first issue of the Dutch Journal on Culture and Crime, the editors first examine the history of cultural perspectives in criminology and the reasons why this approach is particularly relevant to analyse crime in our globalised consumer societies. Cultural criminology’s social-constructionist perspectives on the key-concepts, culture and crime, are elaborated next, followed by an exposé of the new imaginative meaning of media-studies in our age of information. In the last paragraph the claim is made that, although ethnography plays a key-role, there is a wide variety of research methodologies that can be applied in cultural criminological framework.

This article studies community notification of suspects, as in Crimewatch and its Dutch equivalent, Opsporing Verzocht, and on police websites. It explores how these messages frame crime, and how these frames change when police messages are copied by private websites. Publication of suspects by the police is characterized as responsibilization, because it legitimizes the authority of the police and reinforces existing relations between police and the public. The new media, however, undermine the frame of authority as it is presented by the police, either because publications aiming to detect suspects are transformed into news or entertainment, or because private websites select those publications that give room to the questioning of police performance. As for the presentation of the publications, this article compares the Dutch TV program Opsporing Verzocht and the website GeenStijl. Opsporing Verzocht centers around the victim, while GeenStijl presents the subject from an enforcement point of view. GeenStijl users are not addressed as the police’s helping hands, but as autonomous agents of social control, sometimes standing in for the police. Community notification of suspects therefore not only influences detection rates, but also the relation between the police, the public, and offenders in society.

Seemingly a difficult concept, participation in restorative justice can be understood better once the notion is broadened and operationalized. Therefore a proposal will be made here to first broaden the meaning of participation beyond participation of stakeholders and ‘community’ in the process as it is generally understood in restorative justice literature, and second break down the concept of participation into five different levels: (1) involvement of the stakeholders and the ‘community’ in the restorative process; (2) participation of citizens as volunteer mediators/facilitators in the process; (3) self-referrals from citizens; (4) voluntary participation of experts in restorative justice organisations; (5) promotion from ex-victims of crime and ex-offenders. Based on this approach, in the end, the author opens up the discussion on the meaning of active citizenship for restorative justice in continental Europe. Before discussing how the broadening of the concept of participation is concretely envisioned, the author argues on the importance of prioritizing the notion of citizenship instead of ‘community’ in the continental European restorative justice discourse.

In het artikel wordt onderzocht in hoeverre verband bestaat tussen de mate van effectiviteit van milieutoezicht en de mate van onafhankelijkheid van dit toezicht. Aanleiding zijn onder meer diverse milieu-incidenten (Thermphos, Probo Koala) en het niet op orde zijn van het milieutoezicht. Voor bestuurders is milieutoezicht een haast onmogelijke opgave. De organisatie van het milieutoezicht wordt getoetst aan de Nederlandse en Europese eisen aan toezicht. Geconcludeerd wordt dat gebrek aan onafhankelijkheid van milieutoezicht een belangrijke oorzaak van de bestaande problemen is. De auteurs doen aanbevelingen voor het oprichten van een Nederlandse Omgevingsautoriteit.

Since the legalization of the prostitution sector, not only has the combating of human trafficking through criminal law been substantially fortified, but also the administrative approach to human trafficking in that sector. This integral approach of human trafficking, in which administrative and criminal law measures complement each other, is necessary to combat this harrowing type of crime. The criminal law-administrative approach offers good footholds for a more forceful reaction to human trafficking. Besides the preventive effect administrative measures can have as a complement to criminal law, administrative supervision can also be useful to obtain criminal law information. However, that brings several new dilemmas with it that are connected to the phenomenon of the blurring of spheres. Under certain circumstances, the blurring of spheres between a criminal law and an administrative approach can lead to an improper use of competencies. We conclude that in the manner in which the prostitution sector is currently supervised, the legal protection of the citizen against actions of the supervisor is inadequately guaranteed. That does not mean that information that is obtained through administrative supervision may no longer be used in criminal cases. It is to be recommended however that several changes be made to current practice, which may prevent the improper use of supervisory competencies in prostitution controls.

This study examined whether variation in victimization among train ticket inspectors can be explained by the Social Information Processing (SIP) model which underlies the process of interaction. The study (N=125) shows that the amount of victimization is associated with encoding and emotions. Ticket inspectors who perceive more ‘neutral’ than ‘hostile’ cues report less victimization. Emotions have an indirect relation with the amount of victimization. The seriousness of the victimization is related to encoding, response generation, and response evaluation. Less serious victimization is found when neutral rather than hostile cues are observed, less aggressive responses are generated, and when aggressive responses are evaluated negatively and social responses positively. The results suggest that two types of victimization exist among ticket inspectors: the victim who is a relatively frequent victim and the victim who is victim of more serious forms of aggression.

This article states how in the Netherlands since the 1990s religious orthodoxy became the reference object for threat analysis within the security domain. Political Islam and Salafism are increasingly framed as security threats to the Dutch democratic order and social cohesion. The article uses the securitization-framework, developed by the Copenhagen School, to analyze how religion was put on the security agenda and how countervailing forces tried to desecuritize and countersecuritize this process. The article ends with the conclusion that orthodoxy as such is still framed predominantly in terms of violence and coercion, due to a culturalization of security politics as a whole. This narrows the perspective on religious orthodoxy and leaves little room for alternative sources of civil engagement in society.

In this contribution the current security debate in France is dissected as if it were a play in different acts. President Sarkozy, the political producer, has launched a public ‘schizophrenic’ discussion in which criminologists/sociologists act and quarrel on the edge of a knife. This debate can only be understood in reference to French criminological history, politics, structures and scientific particularities. The contents of this criminological theatre of war can enrich criminological discussion in the Netherlands and Belgium.

In the last five years the number of armed robberies on jewelry stores in the Netherlands has increased again and reached an all-time high in 2010. In this article, recent developments are discussed. The absolute number of these robberies is not very large, but in terms of the chance of being robbed, jewelry stores belong to the most threatened in retail. In general, armed robberies on jewelry stores show a pattern very similar to robberies on other retail targets. About two third are hit-and-run robberies, committed by offenders who live nearby and are generally known to the police as repeat offenders. A smaller portion of these robberies is committed by offenders operating more professionally. In the last ten years there were no big changes in the way these crimes were committed. Contrary to other types of robbery this crime is often profitable. The size of the loot is relatively high. In recent years the price of gold has dramatically increased. This might be considered an independent risk factor. Nevertheless, it's too simple to assess the recent increase of armed robberies on jewelry stores as a direct consequence of this development.

The gold industry in the (former) Soviet Union has always been vulnerable to criminality, such as large-scale smuggling from the gold mines in the north of the country, to the sale of fake gold by Russian migrants in Western Europe. Gold and golden jewels are smuggled and counterfeited; corrupt customs and police officials participate directly or indirectly in gold-related criminal activities. Customers in Russia and other former Soviet republics are constantly being warned about the risk of buying counterfeit gold jewellery, which is sold even in legal shops. This article describes the ‘criminal gold market’ in Russia and analyses the motives and modus operandi of the offenders.