From its beginning in 2002, the Dutch Journal of Safety Studies (JSS) has wanted to be a platform for Dutch and Belgian academic articles about all facets of safety and security. Furthermore the journal wants to be a platform for multidisciplinary articles in which safety and security issues are studied from different and complementary perspectives or academic fields.This article provides a content analysis of all 129 JSS-articles. The analysis shows that the focus of JSS is on matters of social safety (and less on the more ‘technical’ safety issues) and on the organization of safety (functioning of organizations or networks and/or the effectiveness of measures) and less on safety as such. Over the years, a few changes have taken place. (1) In the field of social safety the focus has shifted somewhat from ‘the organization of safety’ towards safety as such. (2) Although the proportion of articles from Belgium is small (5,4%), it has increased over the years. (3) Authors from Dutch universities of applied sciences have published no more than 4 articles (3,1%), the first one of which appeared in Volume 6. After some years, these authors discovered the JSS as a platform for their work.JSS covers a wide range of subjects in the field of safety and how it can be organized. Although most articles stem from criminology and/or public management, JSS contains articles from different academic fields such as criminology, communication, law, psychology, engineering, public management, medical science, etc. However, in one and the same article one does not often find a combination of really different academic perspectives, such as engineering and psychology or informatics and criminology. If the JSS aims to be a truly multidisciplinary journal, it should contain more articles of this kind over the next ten years.

This contribution focuses on ‘fear of crime’ research. Departing from the classic distinction between crime and victimization as objective threats, on the one hand, and fear of crime as a subjective and emotional interpretation of that threat, on the other hand, the research tradition is confronted with the so-called fear victimization paradox. This paradox emerges from the observation that fear of crime is greater among women and elderly people, while these groups actually are less at risk of becoming a crime victim. It has immersed the research tradition in a dominant debate on the rationality of the fear of crime, with two opposing paradigms: rationalist and symbolic.Whilst both the paradox and the different paradigms in the debate offer a view at the core of fear of crime research, and illustrate how similar empirical observations can lead to differing explanations, and policy implications for that matter, we argue that the fear victimization paradox and the rationality debate surrounding this paradox, has occupied the bulk of research on fear of crime with what is essentially a nonsensical and redundant debate.

This paper deals with the question of how a partly privatized security sector could be regulated. A central aim of this regulation should be the control of security as a public good. Three models of regulation are analyzed. The current practice of this regulation in the Netherlands shows a serious lack of effectiveness. One of our main conclusions is that neither the state nor the private sector is able to enforce this regulation on their own. However, it is assumed that the state should have a central and integrated regulatory role in this field, with more attention paid to the practical implementation of it, with the power and will to sanction private agencies if necessary. In addition managers of private security companies should adopt a role as public managers with a public moral duty. Regulation of security is faced with a double problematic, not only the horizontal fragmentation of the field, but also the vertical fragmentation, often resulting in a serious gap between managers and those in the field, both in the public and the private sector. This implies that the regulation should not only rest on the state and on self-regulation by the sector at management level, but also on the promotion of a practical ethic for security workers to steer and regulate their daily work.

Internal and external security are traditionally considered to be distinct concepts that allow police organizations and tasks to be differentiated from those of the military. Internal security is then viewed as oriented towards the maintenance of the order within a state and to be exercised against fellow citizens with a limited use of violence. External security deals with the protection of the territory and is exercised against foreign enemies, may include the use of excessive violence. In practice, however, the boundaries between these concepts and between police and military aims and tasks have become blurred. The extension of the security concept, a change in the nature of interventions on foreign territory and a shifting image of the enemy create an overlap between internal and external security issues and actors. This evolution seriously challenges the existing legal and normative frameworks that rely heavily on assumptions based on the distinction between internal and external security.

The author provides a discussion of the articles in this issue of the Tijdschrift voor Veiligheid (Journal on Security) on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. He notes that there is an increasing hybridising, subjectification and fragmentation in the security area. The increasing interweaving of security politics seems to apply least to a common approach in ‘social security and physical safety issues’ (crime control and disaster and crisis management), while exactly this was aimed for in so-called integral security politics. According to the author that is the case because of ‘the moral pin’, which plays a dominant role in crime, but not in safety issues. The entanglement of forms of security identified by the author has a normative basis – it comes from the social order of an increasingly complex society. For the future an ever greater responsibilisation can be expected, in which the perception of security becomes even more important than it is now already. Not a big orchestrated security policy, but jazzy structures will then determine the prospects.