Criminal networks

Catch Me If You Can: Mafia’s Infiltration into Italy’s Healthcare System

8 Feb, 2024
Mariarita Piraino

This blog joint second place winner of the 2023 winner of the Bill Tupman Prize, submitted in partnership with the ECPR-SGOG Summer School. Essential to millions of Italians, healthcare has not gone untouched by the Mafia’s ever-diversifying business models and influential reach. Rather, inadequate controls may leave an opening for…

Read more

Trafficking into Forced Criminality: the Rise of Scam Centres in Southeast Asia

18 Jan, 2024
Dr Sasha Jesperson

In Southeast Asia, a growing number of scam centres have been identified, where recruits groom victims online to encourage investment in fraudulent schemes. But these recruits are victims themselves; tricked with job offers in another country, they are forced into criminality. Described using the Chinese term Shāzhūpán, or ‘pig-butchering scams’,…

Read more

Understanding the Female Wildlife Offender: Lessons from the Case Files

6 Sep, 2023
Anne-Marie Weeden

Closed case reviews indicate that gender norms might be as harmful as they are helpful in understanding female involvement in wildlife crime, with better evidence needed to inform enforcement strategies. The role of women in relation to wildlife crime is viewed through a lens of localised gender norms, social conventions…

Read more

The ‘Global Power Competition – Transnational Organised Crime’ Nexus: Lessons from Michoacán

7 Mar, 2023
Fausto Carbajal Glass

How does strategic competition between the United States and China influence the evolution of transnational organised crime in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? Although it is becoming increasingly visible, the “global power competition – transnational organised crime’ nexus remains unexplored in national and international scholarship as well as in…

Read more

Europe’s Guns: A Threat and Opportunity the UK Can’t Ignore

31 Jan, 2023
Sean Lundy

The senseless shooting of Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve shocked the UK. Similar tragedies in the UK often have their origins in the supply of illicit firearms from Europe. To stem and turn the tide against gun violence, we must look towards Europe. In 5 years as the National Crime…

Read more

Replacing Armed Governance: the Challenge of ‘Total Peace’ in Colombia

18 Jan, 2023
Reynell Badillo Sarmiento, Juan Corredor-Garcia and Luis Fernando Trejos Rosero

Contrary to common thought, warzones are not always disorderly scenarios without rules. In most cases, the ways in which citizens must behave in a warzone to avoid being punished is very clear. However, in these afflicted territories it is often the armed groups, and not the states, who largely determine…

Read more