GERN Research Paper Series

GERN (Groupement Européen de Recherches sur les Normativités) is a large consortium of scientific researchers in the domain of deviance and social control, more precisely studying delinquency, penal institutions, public policies of security and the importance of penal questions in society (insecurity, penal justice, juvenile justice, sanctions, police, private security, public policies of security and of prevention, the creation of the penal law, violence, informal economy, economic and financial delinquency, the relation of legal norms with other social norms, ...).

The consortium is multidisciplinary, nourished in the first instance by sociology, history, political sciences, law and criminology (in those countries where it is a discipline). To a smaller extent anthropology, demography and economic sciences are present within the consortium. Today GERN is a scientific network present in ten European countries, uniting forty research units and researchers of different disciplines. The consortium includes some associated centres outside Europe, e.g. Canada, Argentina and India. GERN has arrangements for collaboration with other networks or with international scientific organisations.

With the inauguration of this new Research Paper Series, GERN intends to monitor and disseminate cutting-edge studies into European security issues, reflecting the result of doctoral research in the framework of the GERN. This series provides an excellent platform from which to survey key emergent topics in the field. With this new series the editors and authors are contributing to a better understanding of contemporary questions, presenting recent research results and scientific reflection, by devising new approaches and by re-evaluating the heritage of social sciences in this domain. It implies a new openness with regard to other disciplines and to the normative questions arising from the commission of crime and the formal reaction to it by actors in the criminal justice system and beyond.

7. Making Strategic Choices in Social Science Research

6. Challenges of Comparative Criminological Research

5. Deviance and Crime – Social Control, Criminal Justice, and Criminology in Europe

4. Crime and Order, Criminal Justice Experiences and Desistance

3. Criminology, Security and Justice. Methodological and epistemological issues

2. Desistance, Social Order and Responses to Crime

1. Crime, Violence, Justice and Social Order