With almost 40,000 students, the University Hamburg is Germany’s third largest university. The University has 23 partner universities, many Erasmus agreements, 7 collaborative research centres, 6 state clusters of excellence and important research associations (e.g. two international Max-Planck-Institutes).
The Institute for Criminological Research (IKS, Department of Social Sciences) focusses on sociological approaches to the study of crime and control and is a distinguished and outstanding institution in the otherwise juridically oriented German criminology landscape. For nearly 30 years now it offers the only social science oriented, interdisciplinary Post-Graduate Criminology Programme in Germany.
The IKS provides up-to-date interdisciplinary, critical criminological research and scholarship by experienced and reputed scholars. Owed to the perspectives of critical criminology, it addresses current debates in criminology with a particular focus on international discourses and developments. Main subjects of the M.A. study programme in “International Criminology” are “International Criminal and Security Policy”, “Penal Policy and its Alternatives”, “Policing” and “Media and Knowledge”.
For other thesis supervision at the Hamburg University, staff expertise in the following fields are offered: terrorism, security policy and human rights; crime and social exclusion; ethnographic research / methodology; punitiveness and the sociology of deviance and control.