Perhaps it was Emile Durkheim who was the first rural criminologist in Europe when he described mechanical societies as small, homogenous, traditional people controlling each other using informal social control mechanisms. He also delineated organic societies that are big, heterogeneous and where people are alienated from each other. This is presumably the first social science work on the divide between the rural and urban.

There has been a considerable change since Durkheim’s passing – mass migration from the ‘old’ world continued into the early twentieth century, swelling populations in cities in the ‘new’ worlds of the United States, of Australia and in Europe. We can only imagine how he would feel if he could witness the blurred and complex nature of the urban and rural divide in these contemporary globalized times. Rural criminology has in Europe, as elsewhere, been slow in formation given the focus of the social sciences on the problems of crime that we have associated with urbanization.

Since 2000, there have been research projects and publications on rural perspectives, discussing rural criminology, crime, victimization, fear of crime, policing and crime prevention and reflections on rural criminology. These contributions have utlized a wide variety of theoretical approaches and methodologies. The multidisciplinary backgrounds of rural criminologists working in Europe include sociology, law, geography, safety and security studies and psychology ought to be noted; and the potential exists for transdisciplinary perspectives and approaches to emerge especially in the area of security studies. This stems from considerable work in areas of the natural and computer sciences on diverse areas such as environmental sustainability, food security and critical infrastructure protection such as cyberattacks. In Europe, the European Union invests heavily in security research under its Horizon Europe programme.

The most comprehensive work on rural crime, safety and security in rural settings with a European contextualization thus far was published by Ceccato (2016). Ceccato and a co-author also presented preventative activities in the fields of youth alcohol abuse, addiction and violence in rural Sweden. Also, a reflection on the future challenges of rural criminology research was presented by Meško (2020).