Production, Trade and Governance: a New Framework for the Understanding of Organized Crime

There is a consensus that organized crime (OC) is harmful and its profits are immense.

Yet the concept of OC itself lumps together people engaging in very different activities—from peasants in Colombia to professional enablers in London to mafias in Italy—, and the data used by scholars are generally of poor quality. We are in urgent need to establish this field of study on solid analytical grounds and to produce good data.

CRIMGOV is designed to do precisely that. We first present a framework that distinguishes three key activities of OC groups: Production, Trade and Governance. We will ask: How do groups engaged in (criminal) Production, Trade or Governance differ from each other? Do they each have a different organizational structure, members with different ‘professional’ profile and skills?

To what extent is there overlap between them?

Finally, under which conditions would one group specializing in Production or Trade evolve into a Governance-type OC group?

The project will study a broad range of organized crime in depth: local cybercrime production hubs in Europe, the international trade of drugs from Colombia to Europe, the emergence of criminal governance inside and outside prisons.

The project will produce high-quality data sets that are hard to collect and time-consuming to code, a challenging and risky yet highly rewarding contribution to knowledge.

Breaking traditional disciplinary boundaries between the social sciences and adopting a global outlook, CRIMGOV will overturn long-held theoretical approaches, produce substantial new findings and data, and speak to scholars across different disciplines.