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Conference Venue
The conference will take place in the rooms of the 
Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst e.V. (NGBK) in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg.
Oranienstraße 25
10999 Berlin
Follow this link to find the location at Google Maps.
The venue is best reached by public transport: Go either to underground station Kottbusser Tor (U1, U15 and U8) or leave Bus 129 or 149 at Adalbertstraße/Oranienstraße.
Conference (original announcement)
Policing Crowds - Privatizing Security.
Neoliberal Policing in the long 1990s and Beyond
24-25 June 2006
NGBK, Oranienstraße 25, 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg
Organizers: Volker Eick, Jens Sambale, Eric Töpfer
From June 9 to July 9, 2006 Germany will host the FIFA World Cup. The official slogan of this event is "Time to make friends". However, many are not welcome and those who are allowed to visit the World Cup will experience mistrust, monitoring and marketing.
Thus, our symposium takes the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Germany as a starting point to discuss new security strategies developed during the »long 1990s« (Roger Keil) and beyond. Apparently the conference seems to have a sport-political focus, but addresses de facto civil rights, crime policy and socio-economic background. In five sessions two aspects will be tackled on this conference in depth: First, we discuss the crime political dimension of sport and other events under the headline of 'Policing Crowds' (Session A); as we will see, the activities of state-run police and rent-a-cop agencies on and around sport events find their counterpart in the (para) policing activities of public and private spaces (Session C). Finally, we will discuss the consequences of 9/11 for the mobilization activities of (new) social movements (Session E).
Secondly, we will focus on the mushrooming of commercial policing entities in the North-American context under the headline of 'Privatizing Security'; within this framework technologically advanced devices such as CCTV, GPS or RFID are of special importance in the actually neoliberalizing cities (Session B). In the final section we center our discussion on 'crime control as industry' (Nils Christie) in an attempt to discuss imprisonment as equally affected by neoliberalization and paralleled by 'a new desire to punish' (Helga Cremer-Schäfer) since the early 1990s (Session D). Hence, the conference aims to contribute empirically and theoretically to the current debate on crime control under neoliberal globalization.