Ensuring energy supply security is a core interest of the modern state, which has historically entailed the colonial geographic expansion of extractive industry and political influence, if not outright control, over sites of extraction. Plans for the extraction of space resources, such as the 2019 ESA Space Resources Strategy, give insight into the increasing activity in space and the governance thereof, and how, or if, ESA diverges from or reproduces past territorially expansionist patterns of exploitation and destruction. Despite existing space law, space resource extraction is still on the frontiers of both policy-making and control. This article critically examines the Strategy through the dual lenses of critical geopolitics and emerging space criminology. It defines and applies colonialism, decolonialism, and space expansionism, showing how discourses of sustainability and innovation can conceal extractive and hegemonic practices. Drawing on both empirical examples and science fiction allegory, the article argues that ESA space-resource strategizing risks reproducing the "colonial trap." It concludes by outlining pathways toward genuinely decolonized and sustainability-oriented governance of space resources.

Despite the Netherlands’ reputation for transparency, public sector corruption and integrity violations remain persistent issues, particularly in transport security environments. This article reports insights based on an exploratory qualitative case study of airport policing of corruption by the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (KMar) at a regional Dutch airport. Grounded in a theoretical understanding of corruption as a socially constructed and discursively mediated phenomenon shaped by institutional logics, professional identities, and operational constraints, we draw on in-depth interviews with KMar officers (N=12) and participant observations (N=3) to deliver a “thick” description of how airport KMar officers perceive, define, and make sense of the nature of corruption, and how this perception affects their work practices in policing corruption. Two distinct logics – socially-reinforced moral licensing and integrity-draining demands – constitute this process of social construction, leading to blind spots in policing and paradoxical moral hazards for officers to engage in corruption. These novel insights expand prior research on the process of social construction of corruption and corruptibility in security forces, with important implications for theory and practice.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly discussed and explored within national security practices, offering intelligence agencies new opportunities while raising significant operational, legal, and ethical dilemmas. This article analyzes how professionals (N = 10) working in and around the Dutch intelligence and security domain make sense of artificial intelligence in the multi-agency policing of hybrid threats, while navigating tensions between national security and fundamental rights. Centered analytically on the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD), this article draws on qualitative empirical material and document analysis focusing on the AIVD's role within the contemporary intelligence-policing matrix. The study adopts an abductive, interpretive approach to uncover how artificial intelligence is understood, implemented, and justified in a context of legal constraint and democratic accountability. The findings show that artificial intelligence is interpreted simultaneously as operationally indispensable and inherently risky. Meaning, it enhances analytic precision while also producing uncertainty, bias, and epistemic ambiguity. Practitioners therefore deploy artificial intelligence cautiously, relying on legal safeguards, human oversight, and incremental experimentation to preserve legitimacy. The analysis conceptualizes this ambivalence as a form of artificial intelligence liminality, in which professionals operate between innovation and restraint, efficiency and accountability. The article concludes that sense-making is central to how artificial intelligence acquires meaning and power in intelligence work, shaping both its use and the ethical boundaries that govern it, and discusses future research directions and governance implications.

This paper examines the collaboration between China and Serbia on lunar missions through a critical space criminological perspective. China's ambitions to gain a permanent presence in Europe, demonstrated by its control of key transport hubs like the Port of Piraeus and the Port of Hamburg, have been strengthened by its collaboration with Serbia. This relationship is based on a strategic partnership and cooperation in international forums, supported by (geo)political ties, as well as military collaboration with Serbia, deploying the FK-3 air defense system. Moreover, Serbia has joined the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) program, which extends Serbo-Chinese ties into space. Building on the emerging field of space criminology, we propose to apply critical space criminology to explore how terrestrial geopolitical and economic struggles are extended and amplified into outer space in Serbo-Chinese relations. We deliver an analysis of how China's terrestrial actions, such as its mineral mining investments in Serbia, may parallel its ambitions in outer space, which suggests that these cosmic ambitions have a complex relationship with Earth-bound conflicts. They hint at how power dynamics and neocolonial logics additionally might be reproduced and extended into a new frontier. Finally, based on the analysis, we point out that these global and cosmic dynamics could inform regional concerns in the Balkans more broadly, leading the way toward Balkan space criminology.

The Netherlands hosts a significant drug industry involving global crime groups targeting local professionals, such as fishers for drug smuggling, real estate agents for money laundering, and harbor masters for marina access. To raise awareness of potential criminal involvement, various government organizations collaborate within an Organized Crime Field Lab. This approach shifts the focus from repressively apprehending criminals to protecting legal businesses and professionals by enabling the public to inform, detect, and report smuggling activities, and by helping relevant sectors identify and regulate activities that facilitate organized crime. This article examines how maritime policing professionals experience the process, outcomes, and challenges within the Maritime Smuggling Project (MSP) and its contribution to building a more resilient society against criminal involvement. Based on 34 interviews, hybrid observations, and an online questionnaire with MSP participants, the study suggests that maritime criminal justice relies on the idea that a resilient community is less likely to engage in or facilitate criminal maritime activities. However, it also indicates that collaboration in itself is not enough to create an impact on policing. Findings reveal that innovations in criminal justice need open‐ended, long‐term, impact‐focused responses from projects like the MSP, along with maritime professionals willing to adopt new policing methods. Yet, traditional, path‐dependent criminal justice institutions often undermine these innovations by prioritizing immediate, measurable, short‐term results that benefit their organization instead of the overarching goal of preventing maritime crime and societal involvement in it. As a result, even those tasked with developing innovative approaches are limited by institutional constraints and ingrained habits.

The war in Ukraine has made clear that we live in a multipolar world where global powers, being the West, Russia, and China, are in continuous geopolitical conflict with one another. It has brought about old and new state-sponsored threats (SSTs), in particular (online) espionage and spreading disinformation, which are instrumentalized by each of these global powers against one another. It altogether puts the national security and economic interests of many more countries at risk. Being heavily dependent on global powers for trade and knowledge building and sharing, small countries seem to be confronted with their powerlessness in the wake of the increasingly threatening multipolar geopolitics. Simultaneously, some of these small countries accommodate important nodes through which international transport and knowledge flow on which global powers, in turn, depend on. In the Netherlands, the port sector (consisting in this study of the Rotterdam and Amsterdam seaports) and the knowledge sector (consisting of several universities, applied universities, and research institutes) form important international nodes for the global transport and knowledge economy. How does the Netherlands position and secure itself through raising awareness of SSTs coming from the global powers it depends on? Based on a study of SST awareness in Dutch ports and higher education, this contribution delivers a possible answer to that question.

Skyping with a merchant of death – On the moral ambiguity of an arms dealer and his biographer The movie Lord of War led to many discussions between Constantine – the biographee of my criminological biography of an arms dealer (Eski, 2022) – and myself. While the movie portrays arms dealer as devoid of morality, exploiting war and human suffering for personal gain (Niccol, 2005), Constantine’s biography paints a different picture. Through engagement with him, condemned as a ‘merchant of death,’ I discovered a man who construes and maintains his moral compass, navigating ambiguity by shifting principles and roles. This article delves into the challenges faced by a biographer in understanding the essence of the biographee’s life, particularly when grappling with moral complexity.

Port in an E-Storm Cyberattacks on European ports have increased recently, especially since the war in Ukraine. Public and political concerns exist about ports becoming victimized by state-sponsored cyberattacks. As ports depend heavily on interconnected technology, attacking a single port facility damages the entire port sector and other connecting sectors. Cybersecurity literature acknowledges that these attacks are often a result of human behaviour, making humans the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. Specific knowledge on how human behaviour and cognitive constraints relate to (awareness of) cyberattacks on ports remains undeveloped. This article therefore considers the status quo of cyberthreat awareness within the Port of Rotterdam and North Sea Canal Area/Port of Amsterdam as important European gateways to discover how awareness of cyberthreats and attacks relates to ports’ cyber-resilience. Interviewed (port) security experts and employees argued the lack of cyberthreat awareness is caused by 1) rapid technological developments in a traditional sector, 2) cybersecurity versus economic interests and 3) inactive partnerships.

This article will explore how the current narratives (and corresponding changes) in Dutch organised crime policing relate to ethnic profiling of minorities in the Netherlands. It will do so by developing a theoretically informed narrative understanding of what we would like to conceptualise as ethnic profiling of organised crime (in the Netherlands), digging deeper into the connection between the role of ethnicity in organised crime studies inasmuch as it relates to the history of the mafia concept and, even further, lingering colonialism in law-and-order approaches. By focusing on (assumed) socio-historical connections between Italy, mafia and organised crime and on the social construction of Italian mafia as organised crime, based on narrative criminology, this article discursively and interpretatively understands the dominant and hidden Dutch narratives on (policing) organised crime. The discovered narratives will be critically discussed in light of the juxtaposition between mafias and ethnic organised crime and post-colonial implications.

The port of Amsterdam and the North Sea Canal Area (NSCA), together, comprise a port area that is used by organized crime groups for illegal drug trafficking, although it may not be as frequent as in the port of Rotterdam or at such a large scale. NSCA's port policing actors are struggling with deterring drug-related organized crime because of a Dutch governance and political narrative about 'undermining'. Undermining is a conceptualization of organized crime that undermines democratic order and the Rule of Law. In determining a collectively accepted new definition (of the impact) of organized crime on our society by speaking in terms of 'undermining' (transl.: 'ondermijning'), the port policing of drug-related organized crime is (socially) constructed. The governance of undermining does not always benefit (port) policing of drug-related organized crime. This chapter is an empirical exploration of how the Dutch governance concept of undermining influences port policing actors in the NSCA. We will show what they mean when they talk about and are policing against undermining. What perceptions do they have and how does it influence, perhaps even bother the port policing of drug-related organized crime? How does it affect multi-agency policing cooperation? These and other key questions will be addressed in this chapter.

This chapter comprises a partisan, critical criminological contribution to this volume, consisting of an analysis of discriminatory policing ‘LGBT-free zones’ in Poland. First, the specific Polish context in relation to the EU shall be discussed, in which the emergence of these “free zones” for LGBTQ+ communities is embedded as institutionalised and symbolic discrimination of LGBTQ+ communities. Afterwards, the Polish context will be placed in the wider socio-political context of the European Union (EU) and the rise of European populism. The discussion, finally, works towards a broader understanding of what we considered a policing of LGBTQ+ segregation inside but without the EU.

The increasing privatization of security raises salient questions about the configuration of private and public relationships in its provision, especially regarding the Weberian notion of the state's monopoly of violence. The security privatization trend has not limited itself to land: the boom of Somali piracy between 2006 and 2012 brought rise to a blossoming industry of private security providers. In 2021, the Dutch government legalized the use of private maritime security companies (PMSCs) on board of Dutch merchant vessels in the Merchant Vessel Protection Act (MVPA). This chapter utilizes Bourdieu's notions of field and economic, cultural, and symbolic capital as a framework to study the construction of public-private relationships in light of the MVPA. The aims of this chapter are twofold. Firstly, this chapter uncovers the utility of a Bourdieuan perspective in the analysis of public-private relationships in security fields. Secondly, it applies this analytical framework to argue that the unique legal and spatial configuration of maritime territory forces changes in the way the Dutch state and private security actors assemble along the lines of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital.

This chapter looks back beyond our origins to consider the origin of Earth and its evolution comprising five completed mass extinctions and (re)births of previous biodiversity. Earth’s origin and its long history has been a coming and going of entire other biospheres and the species they accommodated, rendering the current sixth mass extinction both real and unexceptional. A criminological imagination of that geological biography and history delivers a contextual understanding of how extinction is not deviant but normal, and is in line with Earth’s circles of life and death.