Awareness has grown in recent years over the role that Chinese Professional Money Laundering Organisations (PMLOs) play in facilitating transnational crime and the threat that this poses to countries in the West. Whilst their rise can be seen to coincide with Chinese state decisions, such as its capital controls that prevent the free flow of money out of the country, there is little research on the potential links between Chinese PMLOs and the Chinese state, including on the question as to whether Chinese PMLO activity should be considered alongside other state threats. This research will, a) look into the evolution of the Chinese PMLO threat, comparing well-established operations in the US and Canada with more nascent operations seen in Europe, and b) explore their role in the context of Chinese state activity.

This research project examines how conflict-affected borderlands, like those between Myanmar and China, are intricately connected to development in metropolitan centres. It challenges the idea that these areas are marginalised due to a lack of integration. The project aims to inform strategies for addressing borderland economies and transnational crime.

In the last decade, states have faced a rising tide of hostile activities from other states and their proxies, often referred to as ‘state threats’. In a series of SOC ACE supported workshops in 2023, a taskforce of experienced experts and practitioners identified the need for a more nuanced definition of state threats. This project addresses the language used to discuss state threats or similar concepts (e.g., hybrid, greyzone), and, using a clearer conceptual framework, map out the current character of state threats.

This research examines the evolution of thinking on SOC and development since 2011 and includes a policy review to understand how they’ve evolved as separate, and larger approaches. Key government officials engaged in the SOC-development policy debate since 2010 will be interviewed to identify government priorities to engage on the development/ SOC nexus, and the challenges that were faced at different times.

This research analyses the impact of whistleblower reward programmes and scrutinises whether the concerns that have been raised regarding their implementation have eventuated in practice. Furthermore, it considers what factors have been shown to be necessary for such a scheme to operate as part of a wider strategy to increase the effectiveness of economic crime investigations and concludes with observations for policymakers considering the introduction of whistleblower rewards.

The project evaluates the role of Global Trade Hubs (GTH) along the maritime Silk Road in facilitating illicit activities, particularly smuggling, leveraging proven methods based on mirror trade statistics. By comparing these findings with existing assessments of illicit activities and flows, the project aims to provide insights into the potential risks associated with GTH involvement in illicit financial flows (IFFs).

This reserach explores politically feasible security sector reform approaches to tackling serious organised crime, drawing on lessons of success from Georgia, Colombia and South Africa.

The project seeks to investigate how illicit markets shape and are shaped by the local political, power, patronage and frontier dynamics in Balochistan - the area spanning the frontier regions of three countries: Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

Information manipulation has been a growing concern in recent years, particularly in relation to the disinformation tactics employed by authoritarian regimes. However, the role of non-state actors, such as organised crime (OC) groups, in information manipulation has been largely overlooked. This evidence review aims to fill this gap by examining the various ways in which OC groups manipulate information to achieve their objectives and those of actors connected to them. Drawing on Nicholas Barnes' concept of 'political criminality' as well as on Makarenko’s OC-terrorism nexus framework, this study examines the varying degrees of proximity between criminal actors and the state …

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.

The research project aims to deepen the evidence base on the connections between SSR/G and SOC – how they influence and impact one another, positively and adversely. It seeks to encourage collaboration across academic disciplines and professional silos, integrating SSR/G perspectives and programming into the fight against SOC and vice versa.

This research results from the opportunity provided by the approval and implementation of the Total Peace policy in Colombia, a country that, despite the signature of a peace process in 2016, still has numerous armed and criminal groups inflicting significant violence onto the population. The Total Peace policy allows the government to negotiate with armed and criminal groups in order to reduce violence and protect life, providing a unique opportunity to conduct research on ongoing negotiations. This project aims to research the legal framework applied for the different types of engagement at the local and national level, the way in which criminal governance and the Total Peace policy interacts and identify the extent into which legal frameworks and local criminal governance structures shape negotiations with armed and criminal groups in Colombia.

This project examines how Russia is using illicit financial flows (IFF) to support its military campaign against Ukraine and to further its wider foreign policy goals. The scale of Russian use of illicit financial networks has increased rapidly since February 2022. Unless effectively countered, Russia's use of financial and economic tools will give it an advantage in its war against Ukraine and may begin to pose a potential systemic threat to international financial and trading systems. The research seeks to conceptualise how Russia uses illicit finance in political interference and information campaigns around the world, and how these dynamics may be changing in the new context of the war in Ukraine.

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.

The harms on economies and societies are significant when proceeds of crime and corruption are moved unimpeded through the global financial and trade systems. As policymakers are looking to identify ways to respond better to illicit financial flows (IFFs), this research project seeks to better understand what enables IFFs, if there is political will to address IFFs and what interventions have been successful in addressing IFFs as part of a politically sensitive approach. The overarching conclusion of the initial research was that the line between business, politics and crime has never been more blurred. The research proposes a framework, the so-called ‘IFFs pyramid’, to explain the three dominant means by which IFFs are enabled, moved and held: financial flows, trade flows and informal flows. In its second phase, the research project is testing the use and applicability of this framework in East and Southern Africa and the Mekong region. 

This project seeks to address a number of gaps in the evidence base on the effectiveness of sanctions use by countries to tackle SOC. It aims to make a key contribution as an independent study of existing experience of using sanctions against SOC – and the lessons this experience holds for the UK.

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 research paper examines the nexus between para-statal armed groups (PAGs), illicit economies and organized crime, with a particular focus on the borderlands of Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia. It draws upon new data and analysis generated by a four-year GCRF project, Drugs & (Dis)order. This involved longitudinal, mixed methods research in nine drugs- and conflict-affected borderlands, where PAGs have become embedded within the political, military and economic landscape. The paper sets out a new conceptual framework for analysing the organised crime-militia nexus in conflict-affected borderlands.