I am a professor by special appointment of Dynamics of Crime and Violence at the University of Amsterdam, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute for Crime and Law Enforcement in Amsterdam (NSCR), and affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. My research focuses on conflicts in public space. I am interested in understanding and explaining how people establish, maintain and repair social order, how conflicts unfold in sequences, and in what ways they are managed by citizens and law enforcement officers. My research aims at explaining the micro-dynamics of conflicts and violence by comparing actions in different national contexts, in different kinds of conflict situations, and of people taking different roles in the conflicts. Findings of my studies have been used to inform citizens, shop employees and ticket inspectors about how conflicts can be prevented and managed in public. It has also informed behavioral intervention initiatives of the Dutch government during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Examples of recent publications are articles on target selection of guardians in conflicts (doi:10.1177/1477370820960338), victimization risk of bystander interveners in public conflict (doi:10.1037/vio0000299) and compliance with Covid-19 social distancing directives (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0248221).