Current Projects

As of April 2019 the funding of Balkan Criminology by the Max Planck Society has been successfully concluded. The scientific and institutional nucleus that has been created during the past 6 years by Prof. Dr. Getos Kalac and her team will continue its operations at the Zagreb Faculty of Law, with the generous support of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime through its new global programme aimed at incubating resilience in communities harmed or threatened by criminal governance, the Resilience Fund.

Besides continuing its work and network activities with an even stronger focus on Balkan organised crime, Balkan Criminology will organise a one-week intensive course at the IUC in Dubrovnik in March 2020, particularly focusing on investigative journalism, civil society activism and their interlinkages with criminal justice agencies countering organised crime, in order to build resilience in local communities of the Balkans. The course will be held at the IUC in Dubrovnik from 23-27th March 2020. A limited amount of scholarships for funding attendance of professionals from the Balkan region is available. For more information se the 2020 Balkan Criminology Course on Organized Crime.

As of 2019 Balkan Criminology is heavily involved in the study of criminal state capture, corruption and organised crime in the Balkans with a particular focus on community resilience and practical usage of scientific knowledge in the prevention and repression of crime. From our ongoing research projects one in particular focuses on this research goal: Organised Crime & Criminal State Capture – Connecting the Dots Between News Headlines, Indictments and Scientific Research. Besides this rather focused research project we also engage in the study of lethal violence in the Balkans (Balkan Homicide Study) and thus contribute to leading European crime research (European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics) by leading the Balkan cluster of data collection.