This is a comprehensive summary of all mandatory articles that belong to the International Organized Crime course, from the University Utrecht. It is very instructive and useful to report these articles to the exam.
International Organized Crime:RGBUSTR008: Articles
- Introduction: Global crime today
- Criminal Clusters: State and Organised Crime in a Globalised World
- How organized is organized Cybercrime?
- The online stolen data market: disruption and intervention approaches
- Organized Crime: Culture, Markets and Policies (Studies of Organized Crime, 7) (Chapter 1).
- Lyman, M. D., & Potter, G. W. (2000). (Chapter 2.).
- State and corporate drivers of global dysnomie
- The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime
- Human trafficking and legalized prostitution in the Netherlands:
- Enter the Dragon: Inside Chinese Human smuggling organization:
- Mobile banditry:
- The Rebellion of criminal networks: Organized crime in Latin America and the Dynamics of
Change
- Illicit networks and politics in Latin America: The Historical Development of the Nexus
between Politics, Crime and the Economy in Latin America
- Fixing a broken system: modernizing drug law enforcements in Latin America
- ‘The social embeddedness of organized crime.’
- The Black Market for Wildlife: Combating Transnational Organized Crime in the Illegal Wildlife
Trade.
- ‘Professional Football and Crime. Exploring terra incognita in studies on white-collar crime.’
- How Well Do Anti–Money Laundering Controls Work in Developing Countries?’
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,Week 1:
Article: Introduction: Global crime today
global organized crime is evolving, embracing new markets and new technologies, and
moving from traditional hierarchies towards more flexible, network-based forms of
organization. To an extent, the legitimate world is a victim of its own success: globalization of
the legal economy has also globalised the underworld, prosperity fuels the demand for many
illicit services, and improved policing ironically forces criminals to become more organized to
survive.
In many ways, the traditional demarcations between national security and law enforcement concerns
are becoming increasingly less meaningful. Serious and organized crime can directly affect national
security resources, whether in plundering state budgets (with implications for defence expenditure)
to undermining morale and discipline. In this respect, there is a direct carry-over, organised and
transnational crime groupings acting as agents of instability and insecurity.
Despite setbacks both in Italy and the United States, the ‘original’—Italian—mafia is still perhaps the
world’s largest and most sophisticated organised criminal phenomenon, both the traditional gangs of
the Italian south, rooted in the culture of the ‘man of honour,’ hard-hit by the Italian state’s long-
awaited challenge, as well as ‘Mafia Incorporated’, a vast, multinational commercial enterprise, which
pours criminal earnings into both illegal and legal economic activity. this is distinct from the North
American Cosa Nostra, twenty-five ‘families’ and many smaller groups engaged in a wide portfolio of
activities.
One by-product of globalisation and the shift from rigidly structured gangs to looser, network-style
ones, is the diffusion of the identities of organised crime. Where once a gang might be based on a
single ethnic group (or even home region or village), might be identified as such, and might rely on
this to provide everything from internal language to operational culture, now there is little reason for
such an exclusive approach. Instead, organised crime is becoming increasingly inclusive: people and
groups with the right skills, contacts or territory can be accepted into the network so long as they
simply proveable to operate within the dominant culture
the global underworld is evolving every bit as rapidly as its legal, ‘upperworld’ counterpart—and to a
large extent in response to the same pressures and opportunities. The drivers can be broken down
into five main categories:
1. Technological Drivers. As technology reshapes the world, so too it reshapes the underworld,
from increasing the ease of travel to introducing new illicit commodities to be sold, from
counterfeit computer disks to synthetic drugs;
2. Political Drivers: Political changes are defining the new global underworld. At its most basic,
crime is defined by laws, and laws are defined by states. Political changes at local, state and
international levels all provided both opportunities and also barriers and hazards for the
criminals;
3. Economic Drivers: Organised crime is similarly responsive to its economic environment.
Markets open and close;
4. Enforcement Drivers: Successful police operations can have both anticipated and surprising
effects;
5. Internal Drivers: The global underworld is also not purely a product of its context, it is also
shaped by internal and often contingent factors. Alliances between organisations can avoid
conflict and maximise efficiency.
Organized crime is going through a period of rapid and dramatic change. Globalisation is reshaping
the underworld, just as a combination of evolving law-enforcement strategies and technological and
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, social change is breaking down the old forms of organised crime, and creating new, flexible networks
of criminal entrepreneurs
Article: Criminal Clusters: State and Organised Crime in a Globalised World
“Organised crime” is the label given to self-perpetuating, structured groups of individuals who use
violence to gain profit through criminal activities (OCGs). OCGs distinguish themselves both from
terrorist groups that use violence to gain power and from contractors of the modern military
corporations for whom violence is a (mostly legal) source of revenue. OCGs are distinguished by their
characteristic desire to intervene directly in the economic sphere in a criminal manner, and through
the threat or use of violence. In this way, OCGs assume an explicit role in the dynamics of
globalisation. This role offers OCGs a competitive advantage over the state—from violence and
corruption to the systematic infiltration of public administration and legitimate economy. OCGs
combine local and global dimensions (power and market) much better than the state.
state-building may be expressed as a four-phase process. The first phase is that of the political,
economic, and cultural unification of the upper class. The second phase sees the incorporation of the
masses thanks to such factors as the universalization of military service, compulsory education, and
the emergence of new forms of mass communication. The third phase is characterized by the active
participation of the masses in the political system through increased enfranchisement and the birth
of modern political parties. And, finally, the fourth phase witnesses the construction of public welfare
made possible by progressive taxation and the reallocation of resources to disadvantaged social
classes and the least developed regions.
The process of globalisation, reinforced in the end of the Cold War induced an inversion of this state-
building process and a reformulation of the four phases. The first phase witnesses the deconstruction
of the centralized state and the rebirth of autonomous centers of coercive power into forms that,
depending on the context. The second phase is defined by the expulsion from the socio-political
system of ever-greater sectors of the masses; people who are denied all access to essential services
and cut off from the new mechanisms of representation, and, as a consequence, are no longer
capable of asserting their rights and thereby continuing to identify with the culture and symbols of
the state. In the third phase, those same disenfranchised masses are destined to reconsider parasitic
forms of participation based on patron-client relationships, if not violent and sectarian forms of
association. Finally, in the fourth phase, there is a return to violence-based private forms of resource
accumulation and allocation.
Clans are defined as social units, whose members are bound by a form of solidarity grounded on the
recognition of common ties. Administrative apparatus: The clan organization tries to control the
access to the organization during the recruitment phase and the relative lack of permeability
between different clans are the factors that help guarantee the survival of OCGs: a clan must be able
to defend itself from eventual infiltration by enemies. The secretive character of societies produces
two main consequences:
1. The first consequence refers to the distinction between the hierarchy of roles (chain of
command) and the hierarchy of knowledge (levels of awareness or understanding) or access
to organizational secrets
2. The second consequence is that the nature of secret societies makes interactions with non-
members possible only within a “grey zone” of collusion, corruption, or direct intimidation
The clan takes form in a specific territorial context, but once its power has been consolidated, it looks
to establish new settlements. First perhaps in adjacent regions, and then in different countries or
even on other continents. Both these phases might be further subdivided into two stages:
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