About the European Group

The European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control held its first conference in Italy in 1973 on the theme Deviance and Social Control in Europe: Scope and Prospects for a Radical Criminology. Since then, annual conferences have been held at different venues throughout Europe, with the most recent conference being held at Université de Savoie Chambéry, France 3rd - 7th September 2011 on the theme No borders? Exclusion, justice and the politics of fear. The annual conference takes place in early autumn every year and is open to interested academics, researchers, and practitioners in criminology and related fields. This year, our 40th conference is being held at University of Nicosia, Cyprus from the 5th to the 9th September 2012. The conference theme is 'Beyond the Wire': Regulating Division, Conflict and Resistance. While we seek to to involve participants from local advocacy or activist groups (such as penal reform groups), most participants come from academia. Usually, around 70 to 100 participants attend the annual conferences.

In the early 1970s, several criminologists decided to form a break-away European alternative criminology that was neither dominated by American/Anglo-Saxon academics nor by conservative, positivistic or functionalist orientations within criminology and sociology. Radical and alternative criminology had developed during the 1960s, linked with the struggles, for example, of the Norwegian prisoners' movement, the French mental patients' union, the German radical lawyers' group, and so on. While initially class and certain political hierarchies were the focus, the European Group gradually sought to address other national, linguistic, class, ethnic, sexual, and gender barriers in an effort to develop a critical, emancipatory, and innovative criminology. This was to be done through the topics of our research and in the conduct of conferences, with the ultimate aim being to provide a forum for, and recognition of, emancipatory science and emancipatory politics as legitimate areas of study and activism. The focus of this forum would be the analysis of the continually changing face of social control.

Whilst a number of participants have come to the conference from North and South America, Africa, and Australia, the overwhelming majority come from Europe. What many have identified as that which is unique about the European Group is precisely this European context and focus, which is felt to be becoming increasingly important in the subject areas researched by the conference participants: changing forms of social control, in some cases rises in suppression and segregation, issues around immigration, the labor market and border security, as well as the institutions of police and prison, and of human rights in relation to the informal and formal power structures.

One goal of the group has been to highlight social problems in the field of deviance and social control which are under-exposed by criminologists in many other contexts; thus to create a forum not commonly provided at other conferences and international networks for academics, practitioners, and activists working towards the promotion of social justice, human rights and democratic accountability. The European Group has had varying success in these pursuits, but continues to place these aspirations high on the agenda at the annual conferences.

The group took the name that the group still holds today, but the emphasis has been on the various and shifting forms of formal and other types of "social control". This forum seeks discussion topics and trends that are not commonly taken up at more official criminological conferences, although many members of the European Group, as well as participants of the annual conferences, are well-established members of the criminological academic world.