This presentation focuses on a comparison of the development and current state of Criminology as a discipline in Europe, Northern America and Latin America. This triangulation method allows highlighting similarities and differences in the three areas under study, before entering in a more refined analysis that subdivides each region into subregions or countries. The main areas analyzed are the state of empirical research, the development of theories, the links with philosophy, law, sociology, psychology and medicine, the state of criminology in university teaching, and the link of criminology with political activism.

The presentation focuses on two avenues of thought. The first deals with the impact "Balkan Criminology" has had in the past two decades on the European criminological research area while portraying its main lines of research thus far as well as current and planned projects. The second discusses the conceptual and practical challenges of criminological research in the Balkans that emerge from the poor setting of public research funding on the one side and quite considerable funds in the civil society sector on the other side. Such a setting creates ambiguities and tensions among researchers and their institutions when having to pick between fundable and sensible, just as it dictates research topics and even methodology. This appears even more challenging in a social setting where corruption and criminal state capture are business as usual and well reflected in the ways of how public research funds are distributed. The presentation concludes with a set of recommendations for further criminological research in the Balkans and how it might strengthen its impact on the academic community as well as the European research area as a whole.

Criminology is a multifaceted discipline, and so are the academic traditions rooting it, at times differently in different European countries. Yet, as discussed by other presenters in this panel, over the years European Criminology developed some identifying features, contributing to important local and transnational progresses in both research and policy-making endeavours. Some of the key notions and concepts at the core of criminological imagination (ranging from crime to deviance, from harm to risk), however, are increasingly under the spotlight of traditionally unrelated disciplines that intervene in the debate with their own epistemologies, methodologies, and jargons. At the same time, datafication, digitalization and other socioeconomic processes characterising our times and of interest to many other academic areas cannot be ignored by criminologists if our discipline wants to maintain its relevance. How can European Criminology assert and restate a central role and its own identity, while facing a changing social reality? This presentation offers a reflection on these issues, proposing some discussion points to the panel

Cluster n. 3 of the Horizon Europe Programme is dedicated to topics related to civil security. It has continued the experience of the Horizon 2020 Programme, where the mix of science, technology and action was the element to solve the problems addressed by the different calls. The aim of the program, and the aim of the different calls, is to develop sustainable solutions, the involvement of practitioners that could act as end users of the solutions proposed being mandatory. They could be Law Enforcement Agencies or Custom Guards according to the content of the calls. The pillars of cluster n. 3 are the following: 1) Better protection of the EU and its citizens against Crime and Terrorism; 2) Effective Management of EU External Borders; 3) Resilient Infrastructure; 4) Increased Cybersecurity; 5) Disaster-Resilient Society for Europe. The contribution of criminology falls within the area of Social Sciences and Humanities requested by the Programme, as attention to the human factor. That means that a social-criminological component is welcome and appreciated in the project proposals upon condition of being able to interact with the technology offered and used by practitioners. The Horizon Europe Programme will last seven years, and this opportunity could easily become a challenge for many of us to confront with different disciplines, problems and related solutions. Contributing in this way to a clearer design of an applied European criminological approach