Like most cities, the Medellín Mayor’s Office and the Colombian police focus their efforts on managing what they measure--homicides and violent crime. While of course there are legitimate reasons to tackle violence, there is relatively less attention to other deleterious effects of SOC: high levels of civilian extortion, criminal political control of civilians, criminal capture of local state and community governments, retail drug sales, and so forth. In addition to being costly in and of themselves, these actions also undermine the local control and legitimacy of the state. We believe that these harmful consequences are overlooked in part because they are not measured. We aim to demonstrate the feasibility of collecting a wide variety of metrics on SOC and establish the practice of collecting, monitoring, and using these metrics for policy analysis and program/policy design and evaluation.

This project applies lessons from irregular warfare to countering organized crime. Irregular warfare is often defined as a violent competition over legitimacy, and it subsumes the problems of terrorism, insurgency, and political instability. Phase 1 of this research project established the commonalities between organized crime and irregular warfare: their shared nature and the pitfalls relating to response. On this basis, Phase 2 presents a Framework for Analysis and Action originally designed for irregular warfare but adapted here to the context of organized crime. The Framework consists of two “parts”: the Strategic Estimate (which maps the problem, explores its drivers, frames, and strategies, and critiques the current response) and the Course of Action (which uses the Estimate to design an appropriate strategy, complete with a theory of success, phasing, assumptions, and metrics). In a third phase of this project, the modified framework will be tested through application to key cases.

The war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia are leading to tectonic changes in Eurasia’s illicit scene. The war has disrupted licit and illicit supply chains throughout the region, changed routes of trafficking and shifted production of illicit commodities. This project aims to understand changing dynamics in respect of the following: a)  threats in borderlands and seaports; b) opportunities in neighbouring countries as legal companies and criminal enterprises step in to fill the void of meeting the demand on sanctioned goods in Russia; c) actors in smuggling and trafficking; and d) elite bargains related with illicit flows.

This project aims to better understand some of the interoperability challenges for improved multi-agency collaboration and decision-making. While a growing body of evidence suggests we need to develop more problem-driven, politically feasible strategies and operations on organised crime and corruption, there are often differences of opinion in multi-agency teams on what this means and what is needed. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with policymakers and practitioners from a range of agencies, we will design sensemaking workshops to build better understanding of bottlenecks for communications and implications of missing or ambiguous information, and proposing potential solutions to these problems. While generating useful insights in its own right, workshops will also inform the potential development of a Cooperative AI system to improve decision-making for strategies and interventions in the future.

This research project will test an innovative new approach - the Corruption Functionality Framework - to developing more effective and politically feasible anti-corruption strategies and approaches in a way that brings together serious organised crime and corruption in specific sectors and/or contexts. The team will work with policymakers to test the approach in multi-agency settings, focusing on specific problems in specific locations. The approach combines facilitated workshops with country and sector experts followed by semi-structured interviews to assess whether participants found the CFF useful for triggering new thinking and potential strategic and/or operational approaches. The research will also help to develop more granular understanding of how functionality works in specific contexts that could, in future research, be developed into a series of comparative case studies. Insights from the research will also be used to adapt the CFF to help ensure it is as useful as possible. 

This two-phase research project starts by examining the nexus between parastatal armed groups (PAGs), illicit economies and organised crime, with a particular focus on the borderlands of Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia. In two research papers, this first phase has explored the relationship between coercive brokers, public authorities and frontier governance, how paramilitaries become involved in illicit economies and organised crime, the relationship between paramilitaries, organised crime and politics, and what policy combinations can address coercive brokerage in conflict-affected borderlands. The second phase has brought together policymakers to explore new approaches to addressing the challenges posed by paramilitaries. Case studies highlighting key lessons from interventions in Colombia, Myanmar and Northern Ireland will be produced along with two further research papers.

This project examines why third countries – countries neither sending sanctions or the target of them – either facilitate sanctions evasion and avoidance (SEA) or support efforts to counter it. It focuses on sanctions relating to Russia since February 2022 and it based on rapid review of the thematic literature on SEA and empirical research in 13 third countries. Our analysis examines how flows of Russian financial and human capital and patterns of SEA changed since February 2022; what factors affect either facilitation of or support to counter SEA; what are the types of individuals/organisations that facilitate SEA, and what methodologies and typologies do they use.

This research project is a detailed case study of state capture at the South African Revenue Service (SARS). State capture is more endemic than ordinary corruption at an individual level and occurs at a far wider systemic level. State capture entails a systematic and well organised effort of a group of people to misdirect public resources from their intended purpose into the hands of a private elite for corruption and political patronage purposes. It is supported by high-level political protection through the infiltration and weakening of state institutions.

The aim of the research to test the effects of awareness-raising about corruption and SOC in Albania. Awareness-raising efforts are prominent in many counter-SOC and anticorruption policy strategies. This study tests five different messages that are hypothesized to have a positive influence in fostering supportive counter-SOC and anticorruption attitudes and resemble those that are most likely to be used in policy. The study aims to identify what types of messages might be useful and which ones should be avoided for policy makers. Research findings have the potential to enable policy makers to design more effective counter-SOC and anticorruption messaging strategies in the future…

Grand corruption is a transnational problem requiring cooperation among anti-corruption actors. Law enforcement actors find that cooperation is difficult to achieve. This has been attributed to; the political sensitivity of investigations, lack of trust among agencies, difficulties in sharing intelligence securely, weaknesses and discrepancies in capacity, and organisational incentive structures that favour quick and easy cases. However, investigative journalists, increasingly cooperate across borders to investigate, and expose corruption. This research explores these two under-researched sets of anti-corruption actors, specifically the challenges to cooperation and possible solutions among law enforcement agencies; among investigative journalists; and between the two groups of actors.

With the fall of the Ghani government in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, the future of the international community’s financial relationships with the governing regime in Kabul should be reassessed. An understanding of the difference between illicit finance risks and terrorist financing risks emanating from the country, as well as the nexus between them, is critical for this purpose. 

This research analyses the drivers of armed violence linked to organised crime. It is a scoping exercise of the academic and policy literature on organised crime and violence, looking closely at the evidence related to causes of violence linked specifically to organised crime. It also briefly analyses some important trends in research on environmental and societal factors influencing the likelihood of criminal violence. It provides brief case studies that illustrate different drivers at play.