Criminology in Europe

This is my last Presidential message at the end of what has proved a tumultuous year. The global pandemic has impacted almost every facet of our lives, and is likely to have far reaching consequences for education and research.  In this message I am going to offer some reflections on the past twenty years of the ESC, and the challenges which the global pandemic currently poses for theory and method within criminology. The message will conclude with some thoughts about the implications of these challenges for the future of criminology as both an applied and theoretically informed field of enquiry. 

Catrien Bijleveld is senior researcher at NSCR, the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, and professor of Research Methods in Empirical Legal Research and Criminology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since late 2019, she is also part-time council member of the Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy.

I am currently a Professor of Criminal Law and Criminology at the Miguel Hernández University in Elche, and I am the head of the CRÍMINA Research Centre for the Study and Prevention of Crime at the same university, a young but already leading research centre thanks to the tireless work of a magnificent human group with great research talent of which I am especially proud. Although I started my career as a Criminal Law teacher at the University of Alicante, I have been more than 20 years at the Miguel Hernández University, where I have been Dean of the Faculty of Social and Legal Sciences for 8 years.

The Newsletter is in the process of renewal. This, too, suffered delays due to the pandemic, but soon a new, enhanced website will go online, and the design will be renewed too. At the same time, the Executive Board has decided to the slash the print edition (though the pdf version will remain).