In this article, we analyze which aspects of performance theory and the procedural justice-based model are explaining the trust of shopkeepers in the police and local government. Utilizing a survey of 156 shopkeepers and 94 semi-constructed interviews with shopkeepers, which are located at the South Shopping Boulevard in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), the study finds that shopkeepers have a relatively high trust in the police and local government. This is surprising because various attempts in the past 30 years to revive the high street by the government have failed to improve its bad image, as dwindling visitor numbers, poor turnover, limited range of retailers, empty shops and high crime and offence levels show only too plainly. The findings also highlight that ethnic minority respondents have more trust in local government than Dutch shopkeepers. The explanation therefor is sought in the dual frame of reference theory.

Criminology, as an inherently interdisciplinary field, has built on anthropology (and other social sciences) in its development. This contribution addresses the question which insights in criminology have most been inspired by anthropology. First, it looks into the ‘criminal anthropology’ of Lombroso; then it embarks on an appreciation of the ethnographic research design within criminology (as first adopted by the Chicago School); and, finally, it assesses the link between anthropology, and cultural and global criminology. I conclude that anthropology has been valuable to our discipline on four levels: methodologically (in the importance of the ethnographic research design), theoretically (in its role in the development of symbolic interactionism and structuralism, for example), geographically (in the global scope of anthropological research), and analytically, in its experience with ‘doing ethnography’ in economically, politically and culturally embedded ways.

Attempting to understand the Greek narrative of crisis, this paper examines the most prominent forms of violence that emerged in the period of acute economic recession and political upheaval in Greece namely structural, institutional and anti-institutional violence. This paper aims to highlight existing theoretical gaps and avoid common fallacies of the current body of knowledge. In contrast to some of the more common features of the discussion on violence, this note sets out to: a) acknowledge that violence is not necessarily a physical act, b) acknowledge that the outcomes of violence performances might not be physical either, c) specify and adequately distinguish agency and structural dynamics and d) address the cultural and contextual aspects of violence. Vital to this endeavor is to acknowledge, identify and understand the interactive relation between different forms of violence that emerge during the same period of time in a context in which conflict escalates.

A narrative review was conducted to develop more coherent awareness and knowledge regarding emotional experiences of qualitative researchers studying sensitive topics or vulnerable groups, as discussions about this topic are currently fragmented and scattered. Qualitative researchers experience many painful as well as enjoyable emotions, which can influence their personal, social and professional lives. These emotions are recurrently reported in relation to the unpredictability of qualitative research and the different roles of qualitative researchers. More structural and individual attention for emotional experiences of qualitative researchers is necessary, for instance, in academic (doctoral) training and general handbooks on qualitative research.

This article draws on a piece of ethnographic research carried out with outreach workers in London working with street-based sex workers (SBSWs). The aim of the research was to determine the efficacy of the services offered to this hard-to-reach client group. The charitable organization has a long history (20+ years) working with SBSWs in the Kings Cross area; we evaluated their drop-in and outreach services for this client group, many of whom have high-level needs due to substance misuse and mental health issues. We initially conducted semi-structured interviews with women at the drop-in services, but encountered a number of ethical and logistical issues that prompted us to consider alternative methodological approaches. This article explores our use of mobile interviews with SBSWs and the outreach team who encounter them, which we argue gives us unique insights into the realities and lived experiences of both women who work (and sometimes live) on the street and the outreach team members who engage with this hard-to-reach group. We argue that mobile interviews offer a highly effective way of conducting research with a vulnerable population, and enabled us to gain a unique perspective into best practice around effectively and ethically researching hard-to-reach groups. Critically, we maintain that these walking interviews gave detailed insights into the lives of SBSWs that would not have been possible using more traditional methods. We provide empirical data in this article from these walking interviews, including fieldnote excerpts, and consider the value of using mobile and innovative methods for criminological research with hard-to-reach populations.

A rapidly growing field of research and practice, restorative justice has primarily found its gravitational centre within the criminal justice system, as an alternative of dealing with the aftermath of crime. Less explored remains the application of restorative justice in complex, urban, or intercultural contexts, an application which raises a whole set of conceptual and practical challenges. This article is based on an action project which aimed to research conflict narratives in intercultural contexts and transform them through restorative praxis. Mostly used in educational, organizational, and health care settings, action research remains an underused but a highly interesting methodology for criminology and criminal justice research. Its alternative epistemology makes it particularly apt for scientific projects that aim both at investigating crime and justice related issues and at engendering change, either at the level of criminal justice or communities. Although action research has focused mostly on creating change at the level of practical knowledge, when conceived in a critical manner, action research aims not only at improving the work of practitioners, but also at assisting them to arrive at a critique of their social or work settings. Practice concerns at the same time problem setting or problem framing. By zooming into one of the case studies of the project, more specifically the social housing estates in Vienna, I focus in this article specifically on the tensions and dilemmas created by processes of engagement in a problematizing approach to the context and to practice. During these processes, together with other social actors, such as inhabitants and professionals, we named problems (in our case social conflicts) and framed the context in which we addressed them. I argue that participatory forms of inquiry, such as action research, should actively reframe rather than merely describe contexts and problems they work with.

It is common knowledge that the police in executing its duty as “rule enforcer” disposes of certain discretionary powers. Because of the heavy workload and the often ambiguous legislation, the police officer needs to decide on a selective basis when, how and towards whom he/she will act. These discretionary powers are present in proactive identity controls and already provoked strong reactions in the past. The media accused the police of over-controlling certain minority groups. With this ethnographic study into the Belgian practice of identity controls, in which we observe and interview police officers, we wish to get a better view of the way in which identity controls are executed. Although the research is still ongoing, we have already been able to establish that the decision-making process is based on a police feeling which police officers claim to have and which is formed by (a combination of) different triggers attracting their attention.

For quite some years now, crimes of ‘the powerful’ have been studied by criminologists. While researching crimes of ‘the powerful’, researchers aim to maintain and safeguard their integrity and ethics. However, there seems to be a friction between, on the one hand, ethics of the researchers themselves and on the other hand, ethics (policies) of universities. Obviously, not only do they have to justify their actions and decisions to themselves and ‘science’ as a whole, they must justify their research to ethics committees (EC’s) of universities. It could result in complex and difficult situations when researchers suspect that EC’s themselves may be instruments and products of the powerful groups they are studying. In that case, EC’s might undermine ethics and research integrity themselves. What do certain EC- ‘conditions’ look like for research ethics and to which extent do they have to be adjusted or reconsidered when criminologists are researching ‘the powerful’? The key question that will be answered in this contribution is as follows: how can criminologist (re)act ethically responsibly when confronted with (un)ethical committees? To answer this and other relevant questions, after reviewing literature, we reflect on a biographical study of a legal arms trader. We then elaborate on the ‘ethics creep’ (Haggerty, 2004) that seems to haunt social sciences nowadays.

This study departs from the notion that current high-tech crime developments bring various new challenges for the rather anthropocentric, instrumental and dualistic theoretical repertoire of criminology. The article reflects on these challenges and proposes the alternative ‘cyborg crime’ perspective. This concept is the result of an explorative research on the theoretical potential of the actor-network theory (ANT) for cybercrime. The study concludes that ANT and the ensuing cyborg crime perspective enables to grasp certain dimensions of cybercrime more profoundly. ANT can move us (criminologists) beyond the classical novelty debate surrounding cybercrime and stimulate theoretical innovation.

Cultural Criminology (CC) is one of the most recent and exciting developments in criminological theory. Its main argument is that mainstream criminological theories provide inadequate explanations of crime due to epistemological and theoretical flaws. CC’s alternative involves assuming a phenomenological and interpretative approach that focuses on the cultural and emotional components of crime. In this article I shall argue that although CC makes a valid demand for more realistic and complex explanations of crime, its own alternative needs to deal with two main challenges referred to its conceptualization of explanation and emotion. First, two problematic antagonisms should be avoided: understanding vs. causal explanation; and universal nomothetic explanations as opposed to ideographic descriptions. Considering recent developments in philosophy of social science, particularly the ‘social mechanisms approach’, CC should focus on explaining retrospectively through identification of specific causal mechanisms rejecting universal and predictive pretensions. Second, although cultural criminologists rightly question the emotionless character of criminological explanations, they lack an articulated alternative conceptualization of emotions to explain crime. A more refined concept needs to be elaborated in dialogue with recent advances in social sciences.

This paper focuses on the practice of youth justice (termed ‘youth protection’ in Belgium) in which professional actors ascribe deviant behaviour of youngsters to different cultural and migration backgrounds. Intra-European Roma migrants and refugees from the Northern Caucasus in Belgium are chosen as case studies. Discourse analysis of 55 youth court files and 41 expert interviews with professional actors show that deviant behaviour of these young people is explained in different manners. Two discourses are identified: ‘criminal vagabonds’ and ‘war torn children’. These discourses and their effects in practice differ tremendously for both groups. The broader discussion this article touches upon is the selective inclusion and exclusion in the institutions of formal social control, through social practices of culturalisation.

This is an interview with one of the most important social anthropologists of the 20th century – prof. Emanuel Marx.

Since it has become apparent that so many Western women have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State, there is a relentless stream of publications dealing with the motivations of these women to join the terrorist organization. Most of these publications, based on ‘open sources’, are focusing on the motives spread by the women via social media. These social media reports, however, only provide a distorted view of the women’s motives. This article is based upon ethnographic research focusing on 28 Belgian and Dutch families, whose daughters have left for Syria to join the armed struggle.
Although the existing literature shows that the feelings of exclusion in Western societies by Muslim women is seen as an important motive for their departure to Syria, the conversations with the families rarely supported this. Moreover, religion and ideology have played a minor role in the departure of their daughters from the perspective of the families, compared to what literature suggests. According to the families the departure of their daughters was mainly driven by romantic motives and the problems they were dealing with in their daily lives.

In this article, we try to answer the question of how and why the stories of the victims of attacks by the guerrilla movements in the 1970s in Argentina are currently silenced in the public sphere. We analyse how this collective denial is negotiated in human rights discourse. In particular, we show how strategic and essentialist silences as well as denial (literal, interpretative, implicatory) feature in political debates about human rights and political violence.

In the traditional understanding of police culture as well as in the criticism against the use of the concept of ‘police culture’, not much attention has been paid towards the influence of the representation of police work and crime in the media. Although since the pioneering studies in the sixties and seventies of the last century it has been made clear that police work is not limited to dealing with crime and criminal justice, the mass media for decades have presented a completely different image: one of thrill seeking and hardcore action. Police officers themselves tend to ‘sensationalize’ their work. Police culture is no longer understood as a deterministic coping mechanism, but is rooted in active and constructive participation of police officers. As a consequence we must pay attention to representation of ‘the police’ by the media and ask ourselves how identity work by police officers is influenced by the representation of crime and the police in the (new) media.

This article scrutinizes the forces that are at play during the work of police officers in the Netherlands in order to unravel how they shape and give meaning to police officers’ workaday practice. By doing so, we contribute to scholarly debates in the fields of criminology and public administration and give a new impulse to the Dutch debate on policy culture. Using insights from the literatures on police culture, policing, police morality and police styles as theoretical background, an empirical study was conducted using fifteen focus groups with a total of 83 police officers working at street-level as main method of data collection. After analyzing the transcripts through an iterative coding process, four main forces that influence police officers’ workaday practice emerged from the data, partly confirming and partly expanding existing research: 1) environment and public; 2) group culture; 3) organization and its supervisors; and 4) personal factors. However, by acquiring a deeper understanding of these forces in relation to each other and to their workaday practice, police officers’ ‘moral resilience’ will increase: it will help them to act well-considered, strengthening their ability to explain the logic of their actions.

This article argues that the notion of norm images does more justice to the complexity of the police organization. The notion of ‘police culture’ is heavily criticized for its homogenizing tendencies, monolithic connotations and stereotypical and negative evaluation of police work. Norm images have an analytical value, because (1) the images are contextualized within and connected to the rule of law, (2) the images are sufficiently analytically flexible for a situational and relational interpretation of the cultural processes within the police organization, and (3) the notion theoretically presupposes the resistance strategies of social actors against the norm images. The article illustrates the theoretical value of norm images by focusing on the dominant images of the ‘trustworthy’, ‘neutral’ and ‘loyal’ police officer.

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.