The study of international crimes - such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide - deserves to grow into a separate and fully fledged specialization within criminology, called supranational criminology. Supranational criminology entails the study of international crimes, behavior that shows affinity with these crimes, the causes and the situations in which they are committed, as well as interventions and their effectiveness. What exactly entails supranational criminology? What are international crimes? Should other forms of behavior also be qualified as international crimes? What are the specific characteristics of international crimes as forms of state sponsored or state facilitated crimes? Explanatory theories have to be developed which can be translated into testable hypotheses. Which theories from mainstream criminology can provide answers for the prevalence or causes of international crimes? Have the international courts and tribunals succeeded in their aim? This book repairs the fundamental and historical neglect of criminology and breaks out of a state of denial by putting international crimes on the criminological agenda.
Alette Smeulers is professor in International Criminology at the universities of Tilburg and Groningen and research fellow at Intervict and NIOD. The prime focus of her research is on the perpetrators and causes of international crimes and the international criminal prosecution thereof. She has studied the transformation process of ordinary people into perpetrators of international crimes and developed a typology of perpetrators of international crimes. In her research she takes an inter- and multidisciplinary approach and can be considered one of the founders of international criminology - the criminology of international crimes and is a leading expert within this field. She has presented many lectures in the Netherlands and abroad and has published extensively. She has also published extensively in other books and journals and is co-editor of the "series on Supranational Criminal Law: Capita Selecta".
Before starting to work at Tilburg University, Alette Smeulers worked at VU University where she initiated and was the first director of the master International Crimes and Criminology. She has also founded and manages the research network on Supranational Criminology and is co-chair of the European criminology group on atrocity crimes and transitional justice (ECACTJ).
Roelof H. Haveman (LLM Erasmus University Rotterdam, 1983; PhD Utrecht University, 1998) currently works as a rule of law expert in the embassy of the Netherlands in Bamako, Mali, after having served for two years as a Senior Policy Advisor Rule of Law within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Hague.
Before, he worked as an independent Rule of Law consultant on short assignments in Africa, inter alia between June 2010 and December 2012 for IDLO's office in South Sudan on technical assistance to the judiciary, the College of Law of the University of Juba, the Legal Training Institute and the Ministry of Justice. In between, as of September 2011 until March 2012, he worked in Côte d'Ivoire, assisting the Ministry of Justice. Since its start early 2008 until May 2010 he was the Vice Rector in charge of Academic Affairs and Research of the ILPD/Institute of Legal Practice and Development in Rwanda, the post-graduate training institute for the justice sector. He lived and worked in Rwanda as from 2005, initially for the Dutch Center for International Legal Cooperation (CILC), supporting two law schools in strengthening their academic and managerial capacity and quality, including curriculum development. In addition, in 2007-2008 he provided technical assistance in organisational reform for the LDC-Law Development Centre in Uganda. Since its establishment in 2002 and until 2005, he was the programme-director of the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University's Campus in The Hague.
Until the summer of 2005 he was an associate professor of (international) criminal law and criminal procedure at Leiden University and fellow of the E.M. Meijers Institute of Legal Studies of the Faculty of Law, Leiden University, the Netherlands. In 1998 he defended his PhD-dissertation on the 'Conditions for Criminalizing Trafficking in Women' (in Dutch) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Over the past 20 years he published many articles and a number of books on gender-related crimes, trafficking in persons and prostitution, the principle of legality (e.g in the context of customary - adat - criminal law in modern Indonesia), Rwanda gacaca, supranational criminology and victimology, and comparative criminal law. He is the editor in chief of the series
Supranational Criminal Law and editor in chief of the electronic Newsletter Criminology and International Crimes.
