Damián Zaitch

Damián Zaitch (1966) is since 2009 Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the Willem Pompe Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, Utrecht University. From 2000 to 2009 he worked at the Department of Criminology of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has researched and published on social control and terrorism, police cooperation in Europe, critical criminology, and for the past 25 years on organised crime, drug trafficking and drug policies in the Netherlands and Latin America.

He obtained his PhD (2001, cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam, with an ethnographic research on Colombians involved in the cocaine business in the Netherlands (Trafficking Cocaine (2002), Kluwer Law International) for which he obtained the Willem Nagel Prize in 2003. Since then, he has conducted qualitative research and published on drug smuggling in the port of Rotterdam, synthetic drugs markets in Amsterdam, virtual hooliganism, the demand of women trafficking, the financing of illegal markets, and more recently on environmental crime and human rights violations in Brazil and Colombia. He is currently interested in new forms of cross-border transnational organised crime, on state and corporate crime against the environment (food industry, exploitation of natural resources) and on innovative qualitative research methods and fields such as virtual ethnography and visual criminology. He is funding and board member of CIROC (Centre for Information and Research on Organized Crime).