A Response to G. Scott Davis

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez.     

Officially Registered Criminal Careers of Members of Dutch Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and Their Support Clubs

ABSTRACT

Decisive action against criminal outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMCGs) ranks high on the criminal justice agenda. Nevertheless, in many Western European countries the number of OMCG chapters has increased rapidly. Official OMCG support clubs also have mushroomed. The present study extends prior research from the Netherlands and elsewhere by employing a gang database of 1,617 OMCG members and 473 support club members maintained by the Dutch police and examining members’ juvenile and adult criminal careers based on judicial data. While committing an offense was no prerequisite of being included in the database, criminal career data show that the majority of OMCG and support club members is convicted at least once. In addition, we find there is ample variation in both the level and shape of these individual’s criminal trajectories. In line with prior research, the majority of OMCG and support club members are found to be adult onset offenders. A considerable share of both samples however, follows criminal trajectories characterized by early onset, frequent and persistent criminal behavior. Building on prior theoretical accounts of OMCG evolution, these findings are interpreted against the background of recent changes in the Dutch outlaw biker landscape. Implications for the Dutch whole-of-government approach are discussed.