Criminology in Europe

The ESC Working Group (WG) on Balkan Criminology was established in September 2014 as an initiative of the Max Planck Partner Group for Balkan Criminology (MPPG), which was established in January 2013 as a joint venture by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law and the Zagreb Faculty of Law. It represents a working forum of the MPPG's "Balkan Criminology Network" (BCNet) – a network of researchers and scholars with particular interest and expertise in the field of crime research and criminology in the Balkans.

Maria João Guia and May-Len Skilbrei started the ‘Immigration, Crime and Citizenship’ Working Group in 2014 in order to have dedicated discussions at the annual ESC Conference and to use the ESC as a starting point for collaborations between criminologists. The focus is for those with an interest in exploring links between migration and crime and in how intersections of migration and crime are related to citizenship issues.

Following its well-received panel session on the autoethnographic experiences of a group of early career criminological researchers, hosted during the Eurocrim 2014 in Prague, the EPER has recently submitted a successful proposal to the British Journal of Community Justice for a special issue on this topic, titled ‘Entering the Field of Criminological Research’. The special issue, including seven papers in total and scheduled to be published in November/December 2015, will be primarily concerned with various aspects of interviewing; from adequate preparation for interviews with different types of subjects, to the role which emotional impact of a face-to-face encounter may have on data assessment, as well as the necessity of appropriate supervision and support for young researchers interacting with high-risk subjects.

In 2014 and 2015, the working group organised activities at the annual conferences of both its parents, the European Society of Criminology and the International Society for the Study of Drug Policy. At the ISSDP conference in Rome, in May 2014, the focus was on comparative analyses, with papers from Brendan Hughes of the EMCDDA on the construction of a drug law index, and from Prof. Peter Reuter on the strengths and weaknesses of existing cross-national data on drugs.