Negotiating with organised crime groups and addressing criminal agendas in peace processes has become a reality in practice. There is, however, limited research on negotiating with criminal actors in peace processes. In seeking to address this gap, this paper reviews scholarly and practitioner literature across a wide range of research disciplines and demonstrates the importance of creating a framework for engaging with criminality and organised crime groups that extends beyond confrontation – allowing for accommodation and incorporating a wider societal change agenda through transformation.

Huma Haider

May 2023

This paper contributes to research on the relationship between conflict and organised crime (the crime–conflict nexus), using Afghanistan as a case study. For the past four decades, Afghanistan has been plagued by internal armed conflict, influenced by local, national, regional and international external actors, and the intricate relationships among them. To varying degrees, power, politics and criminality informed these relationships. Organised crime provide actors in Afghanistan with significant political power, while powerful political actors are uniquely positioned to reap the profits of the country’s criminal markets. This paper gives an account of the existing literature on Afghanistan’s crime–conflict nexus, identifying some of the key insights that this literature has revealed. To do so, it uses a four-pronged framework, exploring how conflict has fuelled organised crime in Afghanistan; how organised crime has fuelled conflict; how conflict over the control of illicit markets has resulted; and how organised crime has contributed to the erosion of the state. By assessing the literature on Afghanistan’s crime–conflict nexus, the paper identifies knowledge gaps and suggests areas for future research.

Annette Idler, Frederik Florenz, Ajmal Burhanzoi, John Collins, Marcena Hunter & Antonio Sampaio

April 2023

Decades of wars, internal conflicts and political instability have driven millions of Afghan families into poverty and increased human suffering and vulnerabilities, eroded community resilience, and amplified human trafficking activities (and in several cases also created new forms of these practices). This chapter first provides a brief overview of the main trafficking forms, and their widespread reach and practices in the Afghan context, both before and after the Taliban’s ­takeover in August 2021. Second, it discusses the potential implications and impact of the new Afghan government, international actors and non-governmental organisations’ policies, intentions and ­perspectives for the multiple humanitarian crises in the country, especially for the development of ways to address human trafficking in particular. I argue for prioritising humanitarian assistance. Stakeholders need to pursue a pragmatic approach to responses and negotiations that puts human lives at its centre, to prevent worsening the humanitarian crises, exacerbating vulnerability to human trafficking, and causing further loss of life and other harms.

Thi Hoang

November 2022

With the fall of Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban swept back to power with almost shocking speed and coherence. This was despite two decades of intervention and state-building efforts by NATO powers, which had sought to forestall precisely this outcome. This failure of a direct intervention strategy raised immediate questions over the future shape of Afghanistan’s drug policies and how it would engage with multilateral forums such as the United Nations. The UN drug control system will have to contend with whether and how Afghanistan and UN member states can find a way to cooperate over the country’s drug policies, through anti-organised crime treaty and other frameworks. The Taliban’s April 2022 announcement of the reintroduction of an opium production ban has revived one of the key questions around its similar policy in the early 2000s: is this a sustainable and sincere move, or an opportunistic or impossible intervention?

John Collins, Shehryar Fazli & Ian Tennant

November 2022

This scoping research looks at the potential for sensemaking for tackling challenges that arise when multi-agency teams are tasked with tackling the same problems – in this case, serious organised crime – but with unclear and potentially competing or conflicting mandates and incentives. We look at how sensemaking can help in better uncovering the ways in which different agencies approach the problem focusing on framing effects (e.g., assumptions, beliefs, desired consequences, expected risks and so on). We consider how this can lead to differences in consequences and potential for conflict and suggest an approach for improved multi-agency analysis and decision-making.

Chris Baber, Andrew Howes, James Knight & Heather Marquette

August 2022

This short evidence review paper, written before February 2022, looks at the links between corruption, crime and conflict in eastern Ukraine. As well as explaining the background to the conflict in eastern Ukraine (at the time of writing), the paper also looks at the pre-conflict situation with regard to organised crime and corruption and how organised crime and corruption play a role in, and have been impacted by, the conflict.

Iffat Idris

May 2022

This research reviews existing evidence on the use and impact of targeted sanctions to disrupt organised criminal activity. It focuses on two case studies, Colombia and Libya, in differing regions of the world and with different exposure to organised crime-focused sanctions. The research analyses organised crime-related sanctions data, examines the current state of knowledge relating to the implementation and impact of these sanctions, and draws on the two case studies to identify a number of factors that influence the effectiveness of organised crime-focused sanctions. While the research focuses on other jurisdictions with track records of using sanctions to disrupt organised crime, implications for the UK are also explored, with a view to informing UK policy thinking on the potential establishment of an organised crime-focused sanctions regime.

Cathy Heinlein, Sasha Erskine, Elijah Glantz & Tom Keatinge

May 2022

This briefing note looks at the links between (lack of) political will and serious organised crime (SOC) and corruption. It suggests a new way to better understand political will and why a lack of political will may appear to exist. The lens of political want, political can and political must introduced here, based on Malena’s (2009) work on ‘getting from political won’t to political will’, can help those tasked with developing counter-SOC and anti-corruption strategies and interventions to move beyond seeing political will as a barrier, in order to better develop more politically and technically feasible reforms and approaches.

Heather Marquette

May 2022

This evidence review explores the literature on political will in relation to organised crime, kleptocracy, illicit finance, sanctions, trafficking and COVID-19. Findings demonstrate the importance of political will for effectively tackling SOC, illicit finance and transnational corruption, but also why it is so challenging to find political will, measure it and create demand for it.

Iffat Idris

May 2022