Candidates to the ESC board, 2024: Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac - Election of ESC President

I am both honoured and grateful to be nominated for the role of ESC President.

The ESC, or to be more exact the European criminological community it represents, has played an utmost important role in my professional and personal development. For the past 15 years the ESC has been my ‘criminological home away from home’ – the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, my alma mater. Most European criminologists, particularly those based in countries or at home institutions where Criminology has only more recently, throughout the past decade, gained more scientific momentum and a stronger institutional standing, will be able to relate to my ‘home away from home’ sentiment towards the ESC. In many instances, the ESC might even have been the only ‘criminological home’ for some of us. It is this sentiment towards the ESC and its utmost important role as a ‘criminological home (away from home)’ I would like to safekeep and further develop against the backdrop of Criminology’s galloping expansion and growing transdisciplinarity which we have been witnessing in more recent years.

There is a (hard)core European criminological community in need of its ‘home (away from home)’ where ‘criminological tourists’ provide indispensable cross-disciplinary inputs and incentives, thus adding to the growth and appeal of the ESC. The challenge currently faced by the ESC, as I see it and intend to address it, is to find the right balance between such an expansion, transdisciplinarity, its inputs and incentives on the one hand and the lasting need for the ESC to remain a ‘criminological home (away from home)’ to (hard)core criminologists on the other hand. I am convinced that none of these developments and needs are mutually exclusive, but that a balanced approach is needed in order to safekeep what the ESC is and has been to most of us, while utilising the full potential of what it ought to further develop into for all of us: a transdisciplinary ‘criminological home (away from home)’ for “persons actively engaged in research, teaching and/or practice in the field of criminology”, referring to “all scholarly, scientific and professional knowledge concerning the explanation, prevention, control and treatment of crime and delinquency, offenders and victims, including the measurement and detection of crime, legislation and the practice of criminal law, and law enforcement, judicial, and correctional systems” (Section 2 of the Constitution of the European Society of Criminology, available online). I would thus like to further strengthen the ongoing efforts of the ESC to more impactfully implement “the dissemination of criminological knowledge at the European level”, particularly by reaffirming the ESC’s role of a key stakeholder within the Council of Europe and the European Union on matters of “the explanation, prevention, control and treatment of crime and delinquency, offenders and victims”*.

In terms of my own research and criminological profile, relevant to the role of ESC President, I would like to point out the contributions of the Balkan Criminology Network under my leadership and the patronage of Professor Hans-Jörg Albrecht. Since 2012, the network has been instrumental in detecting, utilising, developing and disseminating criminological research and scholarship in the Balkans and throughout the ESC. The criminological, victimological and homicidal ‘mappings’ have brought the Balkans into the focus of the European criminological community and the ESC. This work reflects my commitment to advancing criminological thought and research where it is most needed.

I currently hold a full professorship in Criminal (Procedural) Law, Criminology and Victimology at the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Law (2022-present). I have also served as head of the Department of Criminal Law (2021-2023) and the Institute for Criminal Sciences, Criminology and Victimology (2019-2021). Additionally, I am a Professeur Invité at the Université de Lausanne – École des sciences criminelles (2018-present) and Sciences Po – Paris School of International Affairs (2020-present). I served as a member of the ESC Board (2014-2017) and have attended most ESC conferences since 2009.