In this contribution the author reviews Probleemoplossend strafrecht en het ideaal van responsieve rechtspraak by Suzan Verberk.

Recent scientific literature and media focus on new styles, rituals and instruments in the phenomena of social disorder and resistance. People fight for new issues, in changing in/out group settings, with social media as a means to an end that often is not so obvious from the start. The various, dynamic local contexts define how and why these new ambitions and techniques become trenchant.From a long term perspective patterns and appearances do change, but (perceived) distributive injustice and procedural injustice remain the key drivers motivating social disorder and resistance. Feeding on recent studies about the immediate aftermath of the Second World War (1945), the Arab Spring (2010-2011), and the British ‘Summer of Discontent’ (2011), this article reconsiders the question: what’s new?

In 5 Grams: Crack Cocaine, Rap Music, and the War on Drugs Dimitri Bogazianos, an assistant professor at the departement Criminal Justice of California State University, discusses the cultural links between the American ‘war on drugs’ and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. At the centre of his analysis is the parallel between what the author calls ‘the crack game’ and ‘the rap game’. On the one hand Bogazianos examines the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on the paradoxical punishment structure of crack; on the other hand the author focuses on the multiple ways crack appeared as a symbolical reference in the lyrics of rap artists.

Order in Security. A Dynamic Perspective (Schuilenburg 2012) is a theoretical and empirical study of self-organizing processes of change taking place within what the author calls ‘security assemblages’. In this review, the study is favorably evaluated as a form of empirical philosophy and praised for usefully introducing French philosophy into the field of security studies. In terms of empirical sociological research, however, the study is more critically reviewed as offering little insight into the perceptions, emotions, interpretations and meanings that actors assign to their conduct in this field.