Criminology in Europe

A few weeks ago, four well-known scientists were guests on a popular, early evening Dutch entertainment television program to show the audience their personal favorite, universally valid formula from their discipline (physics, mathematics, astronomy and econometrics) and to explain why they liked that formula very much. I will not even try to repeat these formulas but I must admit that for just a split second a feeling of jealousy overtook me. We do not possess such formulas in criminology; we do not claim overtly to have universal theories or knowledge anyway. My momentary feeling of jealousy is of course ridiculous and very naïve knowing the complexity of our discipline. Who in our discipline sincerely believes that one universal theory (in an elegant formula) is valid everywhere and at all times as physicists do? But denying one grand theory does not imply that we are convinced that our stock of knowledge is completely contextualized.