INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE AND APPLIED CRIMINAL JUSTICE FALL 2005, VOL. 29, NO. 2 An Overview of Criminological Research on Violence in Slovenia 1 GORAZD MES ˇ KO 2 ALES ˇ BUC ˇ AR-RUC ˇ MAN 3 University of Maribor, Slovenia This paper presents a survey of Slovene criminological research on violence since Sloven- ia’s independence in 1991. The authors reviewed all research projects conducted at the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana and the College of Police and Security Studies (now Faculty of Criminal Justice, University of Maribor) and other academic institutions in Slovenia. This paper shows the prevailing studied forms of violence in contemporary Slovenian society and research methods used to reveal the dimensions and the extent of all kinds of violence. INTRODUCTION After having recently read a book on crime in Eastern Europe (DeNike, Ewald, & Nowlin, 1995), we concluded that Eastern and Western criminolo- gies differ significantly. What impressed us the most were the implications about the underdevelopment of Eastern criminology and the advanced nature of Western criminology (especially in terms of methods used and financing criminological research). Therefore, we decided to study closely a part of Slovenian criminological research  research on violence, which seems to be omnipresent in both Western and Eastern societies. Various forms of violence are social phenomena that are the subjects of numerous criminological studies. Different researchers have been trying for a long period of time to analyze the backgrounds of the violent behavior of individuals and also society as a whole. Quite a few theories try to explain the causes of violent behavior (e.g., psychoanalytic theory of aggression: aggres- sion as an instinct; frustration-aggression theory; and social learning theory of aggression: aggression as a result of biological and physiological changes in organisms, etc.). Researchers have analyzed and tried to explain different forms of violent behavior that occur in Slovenia. It is important and reason- able, for the development of criminological study, for researchers and practi- tioners in a field of violence to know what kind of research on violence has been conducted in Slovenia. Because of the language barrier, this is a very difficult if not almost impossible process without translations. Few studies on violence conducted in Slovenia have been translated into the English (or some other international) language. The main goal of this paper is to overcome this language barrier and present Slovene research on violence to a wider interna- tional scientific community. This paper also investigates the influence of the