Workshop on Agent-based modelling & Criminal Markets

Want to understand and be able to model the dynamics of criminal markets?

Join the Illicit Trade workshop on the 15th of May, which combines criminal law expertise with behavioural sciences and introduces participants to agent-based modelling. Sign up via this link.

This workshop is FREE to attend and will take place at University College Groningen. The Illicit Trade Group is a Agricola research group under the Development &Security them

Drugs and models

The first part of the workshop will delve into the ways in which different drug markets, in particularly the cannabis and cocaine market, are regulated and policed and which signals this sends to consumers but also traffickers in these markets.

The cannabis market is a largely domestic one, with all participatory roles readily accessible to local users and dealers. The cocaine market is globally structured, including a number of groups that control international trafficking. Law enforcement approaches differ substantially, with a much greater acceptance of cannabis use and a ‘message to society’ that that substance is more acceptable than other substances, likely influencing the choices of consumers. This also raises the question of how laws and policies invite certain behaviour and are able to steer societal acceptance and conduct.

The second part of the workshop will discuss the methodology of agent-based modelling and will show how agent-based models can be a suitable tool to simulate the varying social dynamics in drug markets and study the conditions under which criminal and illegal behaviours are more contagious. Such models would contribute to integrated models of drug systems, connecting developments in consumer demand with trafficking behaviour, supply chains and production in countries of origin. After experimenting with agent-based models, the workshop will be rounded off by a discussion on the challenges and ethical questions surrounding agent-based models as a tool to investigate criminal markets.

mr. dr. Pim Geelhoed

Pim Geelhoed is a professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at the University of Groningen.

His interests lie in the field of Europeanisation of Criminal Law, in comparative criminal law and procedure, particularly within Europe, and in topics related to organised and financial crimes. He likes to study these from a plurality of theoretical perspectives.

Next to his academic position, Pim is an ad hoc judge at the Court of Appeal of Arnhem-Leeuwarden. He is also a member of the Meijers Committee, a committee of experts in European immigration, refugee and criminal law. Lastly, he is a member of the board of advisors of the Groningen Journal of European Law.

dr. Wander Jager

Wander Jager (1962) is a social scientist with a broad interdisciplinary interest in social complex phenomena and the transition to a sustainable society.

Being inspired by the work of John Holland on chaos and self-organisation in the 90s, he has since then been working and teaching on the micro-macro interactions in various social systems. His PhD thesis, “Modelling Consumer Behaviour”, integrated key behavioural theories into a computer simulation of human population behaviour. A key theme in his work is studying the dynamics of human behaviour in environmental contexts. As such, he has been organizing special issues on the Human Actor in Ecological-Economic (Ecological Economics - 2001) and Social Simulation in Environmental Psychology (Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2017). Formalising behavioural theory and empirical data in agent-based simulations has been done in the Horizon 2020 project SMARTEES on social innovation in the energy sector. The insights in building realistically behaving artificial communities are being used in EU funded follow-up projects (INCITE-DEM, PHOENIX, MOBI-TWIN). Other applications address the dynamics of migration and acculturation, opinion dynamics (covid), littering and socio-ecological dynamics. In the EU Erasmus scheme, he worked on ACTISS in developing online courses on social computation. In 2009 he started the Groningen Center for Social Complexity.