By Matt Herbert and Max Gallien

This report offers a sizing and analysis of the developing trends around drugs in the Maghreb. It begins by detailing the production of narcotics in the Maghreb, including both cannabis and poppies. Next, it focuses on the trafficking of these products, exploring the types of drugs that transit the region, the routes they take and the groups involved in their movement.

The report then looks at drug consumption trends in the Maghreb, before detailing the impacts of narcotics on state capacity, security and public health and ending with brief recommendations.

Geneva: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2020. 65p

By Tien-Li Kuo  

  Environmental criminology concerns the role of opportunities (both people and objects) existing in the environment that make crimes more likely to occur. Research consistently shows that opportunity perspectives (particularly with regard to individuals’ lifestyles and routines) help in explaining the prevalence and concentration of crimes. However, there is a paucity of studies investigating crime patterns from an opportunity perspective both outside western countries and in relation to cybercrimes. Hence, it is not clear whether non-Western and online contexts exhibit similar patterns of crime as would be predicted by an opportunity perspective. This thesis is concerned with criminal victimisation in Taiwan – a less researched setting in the field of environmental criminology. It covers both offline victimisation (with a focus on burglary) and online victimisation from the aforementioned opportunity perspective. The goal of this thesis is to identify individual- and area-level characteristics that affect the patterns of victimisation in Taiwan. To achieve this, the thesis draws on a range of secondary datasets, including police recorded crime statistics, the Taiwan Area Victimisation Survey, and the Digital Opportunity Survey for Individuals and Households. With the application of quantitative modelling, the thesis suggests that the generalisability the lifestyle-routine activity approach in explaining crime patterns in Taiwan should be taken with caution. The findings provide partial support for its applicability in relation to burglary and cybercrime in Taiwan. Furthermore, the findings reported here in relation to patterns of repeat and near repeat victimisation depart from those observed in the western literature. The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of the findings for academic research and practice in crime prevention.  

London: University College London. UCL Department of Security and Crime Science, 2021. 400p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown 

This report analyses the landscape of anti-crime militias and vigilante forces in Nigeria’s south over the past 20 years. It focuses on two vigilante groups, tracing their evolution and the anti-crime, security, and political impacts, before providing policy recommendations. The report explains the context of vigilante and anti-crime militia group formation in Nigeria, including the struggles, challenges, and deficiencies of the Nigeria Federal Police. It discusses the evolution of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), its own role in criminality, and the anti-SARS protests. It also provides a historic background of vigilantism in Nigeria and lays out the various sources from which vigilantism in Nigeria stems. It goes on to review the landscape of militia groups in southern Nigeria and outlines their different types, including in terms of formalization and official recognition. It then details the formation, effectiveness, evolution, and anticrime, security, and policy effects of the Bakassi Boys in Nigeria’s South East. It also analyzes 20 years of federal and state policy responses toward them. The following section provides the same analysis for the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) in the South West.

New York: United Nations University, 2021. 67p.

By Lydia Stubbs and Laura Pearce  

  This report presents findings from a process evaluation of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) Probation Services Officer (PSO) Progression Pilot. The pilot tested an accelerated 13-month work-based training pathway for existing PSOs. It was open to PSOs in the National Probation Service and Community Rehabilitation Companies. The pilot ran from January 2021 to March 2022 across four probation areas, forming two pilot regions. It was available to 50 eligible PSOs who had offender manager experience. PSOs both with, and without, an existing Level 5 (foundation degree or equivalent) qualification (referred to as ‘graduates’ and ‘non-graduates’, respectively) were eligible. Learners were required to undertake specific Level 5 and Level 6 academic modules, delivered by two higher education institutions. This was completed alongside the Vocational Diploma in Probation Practice Level 5. Those who successfully completed all elements were awarded the Professional Qualification in Probation (PQiP) and were eligible to apply for probation officer posts. Before the creation of this new pathway, the only way to obtain the PQiP was through a 15 or 21-month training programme, depending on the amount of recognised prior learning held by the learner. This route is known as the ‘PQiP programme’ and is only open to applicants with a Level 5 qualification (‘graduates’). The process evaluation aimed to understand learner and probation stakeholder experiences of the pilot and capture any lessons learnt.  

London: Her Majesty's Ministry of Justice, 2022. 56p.

By Kyle Johnson

  Tumaco is a municipality in south-west Colombia, close to the border with Ecuador. The city, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, has become a vital hub for non-state armed groups, including transnational drug trafficking networks and former guerrillas, owing to its port and location. Several armed groups, including ex-FARC dissidents,1 have established a permanent presence in several low-income neighbourhoods, with significant consequences for the inhabitants and local governance. This case study examines criminal governance during the pandemic of three groups based in Tumaco: the Alfonso Cano Western Bloc (BOAC), the United Guerrillas of the Pacific (GUP) and the Contadores (Accountants). The BOAC actively adopted measures to respond to the pandemic, imposing curfews, restricting people’s movements and banning outsiders from entering areas under its control. Despite claims that it had yielded its role in governance issues to local community boards, the group continued to wield influence over the local population and provide services such as dispute resolution. By contrast, the GUP did not impose any pandemic-related restrictions, and some members expressed views that the virus was not real, directly contradicting the Colombian government’s stance. This resonated with many in Tumaco, who also believed the pandemic was not a serious threat. This lack of action may, however, also have been tied to leadership and discipline issues. The release of two prominent commanders from prison destabilized the group’s hierarchy, impacting governance patterns and gang organization. Members started to charge the community high prices for services such as dispute resolution, which the population could not afford, and were reported as being unpredictably violent. These two commanders then defected to the BOAC and the Contadores, along with their fighters. The Contadores then ‘inherited’ the GUP areas. Criminal governance also impacted people’s adherence to COVID-related restrictions. In the few areas where restrictions were imposed by crime groups, these rules were more widely respected than those imposed by the local or national governments, mainly due to the implied and sometimes explicit threats accompanying armed groups’ regulation and the authorities’ inability to enforce restrictions.   

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 18p.

By Camilo Nieto-Matiz

  Modern states are selective and calculating in their decision to establish their rule throughout the territory. Within the same country, state officials may be willing and capable of making major efforts to deliver public goods and provide security to the population in some areas, while choosing to neglect others and delegate their control to different actors. This dissertation studies why and how political elites differentially build state capacity in peripheral and marginalized areas of a country and in the midst of violent conflicts. What drives incumbents to increase state capacity in peripheral and marginalized areas within a country? What type of state expansion is likely to take place in such areas? My central argument is that exogenous shocks that suddenly increase the political and economic value of peripheral areas may prompt incumbents to invest in state capacity, but whether this capacity increases or not depends on the preexisting configuration of violent actors and local rural elites. On the one hand, the type of violent actor—threatening and non-threatening—exerts a differential effect on state capacity by (i) shaping subnational politicians’ incentives to cooperate with the central state and (ii) establishing collusive agreements with violent actors. In addition, because greater state capacity tends to undermine rural elites’ economic and political power, they will have incentives to oppose greater state presence and—in contexts  of insecurity and violence—establish alliances with non-threatening groups. In short, state capacity is likely to be higher in municipalities with weak rural elites and facing threatening violent groups. In contrast, state capacity will be more difficult to attain in areas with stronger rural elites and where violent groups do not pose a major threat to state authority....

Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame, 2020. 231p.

By Andre Mancha

I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities’ surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities in Brazil increased the monitoring of spare parts sold by junkyards through new regulations at the state level.

I show that levels of auto theft dropped significantly after the introduction of the new law, and this decrease is more extensive in neighbourhoods containing junkyards. Municipalities that implemented the new regulation presented, on average, a 6.4 per cent drop in auto thefts by year compared to non-target ones. Other crimes do not show a similar decrease, and there is no evidence of a previous downward trend in vehicles stolen.

My results shed some light on the effect of harsher supervision over a market that criminals may exploit to convert stolen vehicles into cash.

Helsinki, Finland:  United Nations University, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER), 2022. 27p.

By Alanna Fulk 

This thesis examines research from the disciplines of political science and criminal justice to develop a theory that explains geographic variation in violence related to organized crime. Large-scale organized crime violence exhibits characteristics of both ordinary crime violence and political violence, but these subjects are generally analyzed separately. However, as large-scale organized crime has become more prevalent and violent in recent years, most notably in Latin America, studies, including this one, have attempted to cross disciplinary boundaries in order to better explain trends in organized crime onset, termination and violence. This thesis argues that although the overall goal of organized crime groups is not to take control of a country, both organized crime groups and insurgent groups confront the state’s monopoly on violence, leading to evident similarities in the way they use violence to attain their goals. They both use violence to maintain control over resources, take control from other groups and retaliate against the government. Previous literature has demonstrated that control is directly linked to geographic variation in political violence and through case studies of organized crime violence in Honduras and Brazil, as well as negative binomial regression analysis of organized crime violence in Mexico, this thesis finds that control is also directly linked to geographic variation in organized crime violence.   

Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida, 2019. 111p.

By The Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Due Process of Law Foundation, and Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

Guatemala’s justice system has been co-opted by a network of corrupt political, economic, and military elites seeking to advance their own interests and to ensure that their acts of corruption and grave human rights violations from the armed conflict remain in impunity, while silencing voices from civil society organizations and independent media. Honest judges and prosecutors have been criminalized, threatened, removed, or transferred from their posts by the very institutions supposed to be advancing the rule of law and justice. Twenty-five judges and prosecutors, including the nation’s lead anti-corruption prosecutor, have fled the country into exile. The impacts of the co-optation of Guatemala’s justice system will set the country back decades. 

This report, produced by Washington Office on Latin America, Latin America Working Group Education Fund, Due Process of Law Foundation, and Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA, provides analysis on the steps taken to undermine Guatemala’s justice system from the stacking of its highest courts with corrupt judges to the co-opting and dismantling of the Attorney General’s Office and specialized prosecutors’ offices. It explains the longer-term implications of the ousting of honest judges and prosecutors and a broken justice system for the rule of law, transitional justice and protecting freedom of expression and the rights of marginalized communities in Guatemala.

Washington, DC: The Authors, 2022. 10p.

Edited by Mangai Natarajan

International crime and justice is an emerging field that covers crime and justice from a global perspective. 'This book introduces the nature of internationaland transnational crimes; theoretical foundations to understanding the relationship between social change and the waxing and waning of the crime opportunity structure; globalization; migration; culture conflicts and the emerging legal frameworks for their prevention and control. tI presents the challenges involved in delivering justice and international cooperative efforts to deter, detect, and respond to international and transnational crimes, and the need for international research and data resources to go beyond anecdote and impres- sionistic accounts to testing and developing theories to build the discipline that bring tangible improvements to the peace, security, and well-being of the globalizing world. 'This books is a timely analysis of the complex subject ofinternational crime and justice for students, scholars, policy makers, and advocates who strive for the pursuit of justice for millions of victims.

Cambridge England and NY.. Cambridge University Press. 2019. 560p.

By Mark Freeman and Vanda Felbab-Brown

Negotiations with violent criminal groups – such as mafias, cartels, gangs and pirates – occur more often than imagined. This publication, grounded in more than three years of in-depth IFIT research and dozens of first-person interviews conducted with actual negotiators, offers key lessons drawn from the most diverse set of negotiations with violent criminal groups ever examined in one place. One of the prominent discoveries of this study – which centres on negotiations intended to reduce or end violence – is how the best of theory and practice regarding peace talks with militant groups (and associated areas such as transitional justice) appears largely absent from consideration or application in talks with violent criminal groups. The gap is striking and counterproductive, but also heralds an opportunity to achieve greater results in future. Another key discovery relates to the endgame of the negotiation. With militant groups, the point of negotiations is typically to end the use of organised political violence, by exchanging disarmament (and/or incorporation into the army) for some form of political empowerment and rehabilitation. With violent criminal groups, the endgame is harder to pin down, because their motivations are understood to be mainly pecuniary, leaving it unclear what they could transform into. However, the examined cases suggest that the challenge is surmountable – and under a surprising variety of conditions.

Barcelona, Spain: Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), 2021. 34p.

By Jenny Pearce

While Latin America’s high levels of chronic violence are mostly carried out by poor young men and mostly cost the lives of poor young men, the conditions for its reproduction are generated by logics of elite power and wealth accumulation. Drawing on more than 70 interviews with oligarchic elites from Colombia and Mexico, the paper offers propositions for further empirical research into these logics. It discusses why it makes sense to use the term “oligarchic elites” to analyse both the failure to invest in the rule of law and also the elite preference for a fragmented security state whose permeability facilitates influence trafficking. It studies the direct and indirect relationships between elites and varied forms of violence, exploring how they have affected the nature of the state in Latin America, the diffusion of criminal violences, and the emergence of micro criminal orders in many parts of the region. Latin America’s history of social action against violences – not least disappearances, feminicide, forced displacement, and state torture – should extend to de-sanctioning violence as a phenomenon. This could open up spaces for social and political participation to create the conditions of social justice which reduce violence.   

London:  LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre, 2018. 30p.

By Len Engel, Erin Farley, and John Tilley

The drug overdose epidemic that swept through the United States over the past decade commanded the attention of public health providers, researchers, criminal justice practitioners, and policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels. Because of its severity and associated mortality rates, the epidemic became a priority among leaders across multiple sectors. As collaboration across these sectors matured, researchers and practitioners began to develop evidence-informed strategies to slow the spread of the epidemic. But the progress that was underway appears to have abruptly stopped when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and fundamentally altered many aspects of American life.

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2020. 11p.

By Christopher Blattman, et al.  

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, scholars and journalists have spread anecdotes of gangs and criminal organizations coming to the aid of citizens, governing in place of the state. They report gang activities that range from enforcing lockdowns to providing goods and services to the poor and hungry. This is especially true in Latin America where thousands of gangs exert authority over civilians in large swaths of territory. Some argue that organized crime is stepping in where states have failed, seizing the chance to consolidate its position. But just how widespread is the kind of gang involvement that captures headlines? Are these anecdotes typical of how gangs are responding to COVID-19? Only systematic data can answer these questions and help assess whether the pandemic will ultimately strengthen organized crime’s grip on Latin American cities. We have spent four years studying criminal groups in Medellín, Colombia, a city with one of the highest concentrations of organized criminals in the world. If gangs respond to COVID-19 anywhere, it should be Medellín. Almost every low- and middle-income neighborhood in the city has a local gang that resolves disputes, polices the community, and often taxes businesses. As soon as the pandemic broke out, anecdotes about gang responses surfaced in Medellin. We set out to collect systematic data on gang and state governance before and during the pandemic. Despite the headlines, gang involvement in pandemic response is exceptional and mostly idiosyncratic. Surveying every low- and middle-income neighborhood in…..

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  Medellin, we find: ● Most welfare support to civilians came from state authorities rather than the gangs. ● Overall, state authorities played by far the largest role in enforcing quarantine rules. ● A small number of gangs, however, were highly involved in providing welfare and enforcing quarantine rules in their territories. ● These rare gang pandemic responses were relatively idiosyncratic. Whereas normal pre-pandemic gang rule is associated with a range of neighborhood characteristics, pandemic gang rule is not. Moreover, gang enforcement of pandemic lockdown or provision of services is almost uncorrelated with pre-pandemic levels of gang rule. We speculate that personal choices of the gangs and their leaders may have dominated in the first weeks of  COVID-19.

Chicago: Innovations for Poverty Action – The University of Chicago – Universidad EAFIT, 2020. 19p.

By John Kleinig, Peter Mameli, Seumas Miller, Douglas Salane and Adina Schwartz

This study is principally concerned with the ethical dimensions of identity management technology – electronic surveillance, the mining of personal data, and profiling – in the context of transnational crime and global terrorism. The ethical challenge at the heart of this study is to establish an acceptable and sustainable equilibrium between two central moral values in contemporary liberal democracies, namely, security and privacy. Both values are essential to individual liberty, but they come into conflict in times when civil order is threatened, as has been the case from late in the twentieth century, with the advent of global terrorism and trans-national crime. We seek to articulate legally sustainable, politically possible, and technologically feasible, global ethical standards for identity management technology and policies in liberal democracies in the contemporary global security context. Although the standards in question are to be understood as global ethical standards potentially to be adopted not only by the United States, but also by the European Union, India, Australasia, and other contemporary liberal democratic states, we take as our primary focus the tensions that have arisen between the United States and the European Union.

Canberra: ANU Press, 2011. 304p.

Edited by Daniel Brombacher, Günther Maihold, Melanie Müller and Judith Vorrath

This anthology examines different dimensions of illicit commodity flows and asks how they can be understood through a geographical lens that looks from the Global South to Europe. By applying a supply chain perspective, it generates insights into how illegal, grey and legal markets merge at certain points in the production chain. This volume seeks to promote a holistic view through a ‘thick description’ of the specific flows and develops practical policy recommendations. It brings together contributions from authors from a wide range of backgrounds, including international scholars, journalists and specialists in both law enforcement and development cooperation 

Baden-Baden, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG,  2022.  412p.

Edited by Magdalena Bainczyk and Agnieszka Kubiak-Cyrul

Although more than 75 years have elapsed since the end of the Second World War, the magnitude of crimes and their long-term effects, caused also by lawyers e.g. in German special courts, make the subject of liability of the state in the context of the Second World War ever topical and valid. Historia magistra vitae est, and the process of learning from history should in this case cover not only the years 1933–1945, but also the entire post-war period. Justice was neither restored nor meted out. One of the reasons for the lack of administration of justice was West Germany's conscious policy of personal continuity after the Second World War. The latter was the topic of the Rosenburg Exhibition – the Federal Ministry of Justice of the Federal Republic of Germany in the Shadow of National Socialist Past. The texts grew out of the context of the exhibition and show the far-reaching consequences of War and Nazi crimes in international relations of a legal nature.

Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021. 226p.

By Alan Doig

This book provides an introduction to state crime, with a particular focus on the UK. The use of crime by the UK to achieve its policy and political objectives is an underdeveloped aspect of academic study of individual and institutional criminality, the exercise of political power, public policy-making and political development. The book provides an overview of definitional issues before exploring possible examples of state crime in the UK and then considering why state crime occurs and how it is investigated and adjudicated. State Crime is split into six sections in order to address a number of key questions: what is state crime according to the literature? What is a crime? What is the state? What are the drivers for the State to commit a crime? What are the roles of the various institutions of the State in being involved in state crime and what, in terms of monitoring or investigating state crime or unethical conduct, are the roles of those institutions, from the police through to Parliament, responsible for holding governments and state institutions to account? Unusually for books on state crime, this book looks at a specific country as the context within which to explore these issues. Further, it not only looks at crime but also the structure of the modern state and thus provides a balanced and rigorous perspective with which to study the concept of state crime. Overall, this book seeks to provide an introduction to state crime for contemporary states which will facilitate the study of such issues as part of mainstream academic study across a number of disciplines.

Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan, 2010. 270p.

By Salvador Astucia

After President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, America became deeply involved in the Vietnam War. Within a few short years, heroin addiction in America reached epidemic proportions. In the background, Israel expanded its borders by force and became a colonial empire ruling a nation of hostile Palestinian subjects. This book reveals how Israel exploited the Western powers’ long history of opium trafficking as a means of toppling the young American president.

Gaithersburg, MD: Ravening Wolf Publishing Company. 2003. 416p.

By Craig Unger

'A bombshell.' Daily Mail 'Damning, terrifying and enraging.' The Spectator House of Trump, House of Putin offers the first comprehensive investigation into the decades-long relationship among Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Mafia that ultimately helped win Trump the White House. It is a chilling story that begins in the 1970s, when Trump made his first splash in the booming, money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump's inauguration as president of the United States. That moment was the culmination of Vladimir Putin's long mission to undermine Western democracy, a mission that he and his hand-selected group of oligarchs and associates had ensnared Trump in, starting more than twenty years ago with the massive bailout of a string of sensational Trump hotel and casino failures in Atlantic City. This book confirms the most incredible American paranoias about Russian malevolence. To most, it will be a hair-raising revelation that the Cold War did not end in 1991--that it merely evolved, with Trump's apartments offering the perfect vehicle for billions of dollars to leave the collapsing Soviet Union. In House of Trump, House of Putin, Craig Unger methodically traces the deep-rooted alliance between the highest echelons of American political operatives and the biggest players in the frightening underworld of the Russian Mafia. He traces Donald Trump's sordid ascent from foundering real estate tycoon to leader of the free world. He traces Russia's phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the post-Cold War Soviet Union as well as its ceaseless covert efforts to retaliate against the West and reclaim its status as a global superpower. Without Trump, Russia would have lacked a key component in its attempts to return to imperial greatness. Without Russia, Trump would not be president. 

New York: Dutton, 2018. 384p.