2025 Election of ESC President: Letizia Paoli

Ever since I attended the first conference of the European Society of Criminology in Lausanne, nearly a quarter of a century ago, the ESC has had a very positive influence on my intellectual development, academic career, and personal growth. This is why I would be both delighted and honoured to give something back by serving and representing the ESC as President.

My research agenda has long focused on organised crime, illegal drug markets, and drug policy, but has progressively expanded to include other topics. After writing my PhD on a quintessentially Italian subject – the mafias – I began to internationalise my perspective in the late 1990s. Over the past twenty-five years, I have investigated a wide range of organised crime actors and activities, as well as related control policies, across diverse contexts: from Frankfurt and Milan to Antwerp, and from Tajikistan to Mexico.

Together with Dr. Victoria Greenfield, a U.S. economist, I have developed the Harm Assessment Framework: a methodology for systematically and empirically assessing the harms of crime and policy interventions. Using this framework, our team has assessed the harms of complex crimes--including drug trafficking and production, human trafficking, cybercrime, and piracy—as well as their “accompanying” (e.g., money laundering, corruption, and violence) and “enabled” activities (e.g., drug dealing in the case of drug trafficking). Our recent book, Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy (Oxford University Press, 2022), was awarded the 2023 Book Award of the European Society of Criminology. Over the past decade, I have also conducted research and published on several other topics, including public perceptions of the seriousness of crime and criminal policy preferences, doping, and fraud in sports.

For my work on organised crime, I have received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime. I am also the recipient of the Thorsten Sellin & Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck Award, granted by the American Society of Criminology in recognition of outstanding contributions by a non-American criminologist. Additionally, I was the first criminologist to be elected a member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts.

My career path reflects a distinctly international—and indeed European—orientation. A native of Italy, I studied Political Science and Sociology at the University of Florence before earning my PhD from the European University Institute, in 1997. I then spent approximately eight years working in Germany, primarily at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, in Freiburg. In 2006, I moved to Belgium and became a full professor of Criminology at the KU Leuven Faculty of Law and Criminology. Since 2020, I have served there as Chair of the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology. I am also a Life Member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, following a visiting scholarship at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and Clare Hall in 2017–18. In addition, I have held visiting scholar or professor positions at the Universities of Giessen, Manchester, Paris II (Assas), Rotterdam, St. Andrews, Tübingen, and Sam Houston State University.

Whenever possible, I seek to share my ideas and research findings with the broader public, policymakers, and practitioners. In addition to regularly providing interviews to a wide range of media outlets, I have served on several national and international advisory and expert bodies. These include the Scientific Committee of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (2014–2020; now European Drugs Agency) and the Scientific Advisory Board of EUROPOL’s Serious and Organized Crime Threat Assessment (2015–2020 and 2023–present). I am currently working as a consultant for the Council of Europe in a committee tasked with developing policy guidelines to align repressive measures against organised crime with full respect for Human Rights.

I have also held leadership roles in various scientific societies. I served on the ESC Board from 2015 to 2018 and have since then been an occasional member of two of its award committees, as well as of the Sellin & Glueck Award committee of the American Society of Criminology. From 2011 to 2015, I served as Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy and co-organised its 2023 conference in Leuven.

If elected, I would welcome the opportunity to contribute with my scholarly, policy, and managerial experience to further advance the impressive development of the ESC, and to support the core objectives outlined in its Constitution, namely, bringing together criminologists within a multidisciplinary society, fostering the development of Criminology, promoting international exchange and cooperation, and serving as a forum for the dissemination of knowledge. Moreover, I would like to strengthen the Society’s support for PhD students and other early-career researchers, for instance by expanding the ESC summer schools. I would also aim to promote dialogue with policymakers and increase the Society’s impact. Given the inherent normativity of our object of study, I am firmly convinced that it is our responsibility as criminologists not only to conduct rigorous, high-quality research on crime, deviance, and related policy interventions, but also to contribute to the development of better – i.e., more humane, normatively defensible, accountable, and (cost-)effective – criminal and public policies.