World War One as a Criminological Laboratory. Scholarly Views and Judicial Practices, 1914-1930

The experience of the First World War gave birth to a huge criminological literature on the relation between war and crime. All over Europe case studies aimed to analyze war criminality and its specificities and formulated etiological hypotheses. Two major categories of authors were involved in this production, both with their particular background and ambitions. On the one hand, scholars considered the war an opportunity to validate the emerging theories on the direct influence of the social environment on crime patterns. On the other hand, criminal justice professionals produced discourse to describe and justify their own (sometimes exceptional) practices in wartime. This paper aims to analyze (the origins of) these different discourses and the ways they circulated and interacted all over Europe. Did ideas on war and crime generate specific practices in wartime already? Or were they on the contrary post war intellectual constructions that were eventually appropriated by the actors to give a meaning to their war activities? The analysis of the archives of the Belgian juvenile justice system during World War One will allow us to integrate a grass roots perspective