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“For on one side lay Scylla and on the other divine Charybdis terribly sucked down the salt water of the sea”, we read in the Odyssey. We can only wonder what Homer and his character would have thought if he found a massive bridge between Scylla and Charybdis had been built notwithstanding the “terrible suck down” of the water between them, in the Strait of Messina and Reggio Calabria, in Italy.

Investigating authorities seem less willing to deploy covert tactics against organised criminals. Rob Le Core reviews the changing landscape.

As Germany joins Canada and a handful of American states in legalising the sale, possession and consumption of recreational cannabis, countering organised crime must be at the heart of legislation.

This blog joint second place winner of the 2023 winner of the Bill Tupman Prize, submitted in partnership with the ECPR-SGOG Summer School.

National authorities suspect that “Primeiro Comando da Capital” (PCC), a powerful Brazilian criminal organization, is behind the theft of several aircrafts in the northern province of Chaco in Argentina. The trend has raised alarms over the PCC’s continued regional and international growth.

In Southeast Asia, a growing number of scam centres have been identified, where recruits groom victims online to encourage investment in fraudulent schemes. But these recruits are victims themselves; tricked with job offers in another country, they are forced into criminality.

The Škaljarski and Kavački clans are two Montenegrin criminal groups originating from the coastal city of Kotor. Formerly united as a single criminal group, in 2014, the Škaljarski and Kavački clans engaged in a violent clash following the disappearance of 200kg of cocaine from South America, which was hidden in an apartment in Valencia.

Any future public security strategy to counter the PCC’s emerging influence in and out of Brazil must reinterpret the role of mass-incarceration in order to interrupt the self-sustaining structure of PCC recruitment and expansion. This is not to claim that imprisonment shouldn’t represent a key punitive and strategic asset against organised crime in Brazil, but that the conditions of incarceration should be a key consideration

The inherent criminality of authoritarianism may be consolidating the business model of global counterfeiting.

Over the last three decades, the use of Serious and Organised Crime (SOC) groups in Latin America as foreign actor’s proxies, for financial, operational and para-diplomatic reasons, has become increasingly evident.

The rapid and unrelenting spread of fentanyl across North America, driven by its high potency and market advantage over its counterparts derived from the opium poppy, has given rise to significant concerns in Europe.

To best counter the threat of organised crime originating from tough-to-reach areas, Latin American and US policymakers and officials need to come to a common understanding on ‘ungoverned areas’ and how they can best collaborate to address the threat.

Due to the fragmentation of drugs markets and the adoption of less centralised criminal structures, transnational organised crime has spread throughout Latin American countries.

Over the last decade, the proliferation of illicit orders in many Latin American cities has promoted the emergence of parallel punishment systems. These systems – I term ‘Sicariato’ – have become a regular conflict resolution mechanism between criminal and non-criminal actors. This piece draws from topics explored in depth in my thesis, ‘Criminal Punishment Systems in Latin America Illicit Orders.

In an attempt to demobilise armed groups in Colombia, President Gustavo Petro’s government implemented the policy of ‘Total Peace’ (Paz Total). Petro’s strategy looks to political negotiations and settlements to draw Colombia’s long-running civil conflicts to an end. However, the government’s selective and inconsistent definition of who constitutes a ‘political’ or ‘criminal’ actor threatens to undermine critical progress towards demobilisation.

New autonomous criminal entities and mafia gangs, known as ‘Ndrine, have gained independence whilst still carrying their predecessors’ ruthless reputations. Information unearthed from successful Antimafia operations now demonstrates how these new mafia gangs are using the coercive, so-called ‘mafia method’ in new ventures – such as VAT Fraud – whilst staying almost completely hidden.

The emergence of modern Brazilian criminal organisations can be traced back to the boom in incarceration and prison overcrowding in the 1990s. During this period, important changes were forged within prison spaces including the emergence of prison groups that, years later, would become criminal organisations. This development reconfigured local criminal dynamics by connecting organised criminality to incarceration. Among the groups that emerged within local prisons, the Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC [The First Capital Command] – is undoubtedly the most relevant in terms of its scope, size, economic resources, and stability.

How does strategic competition between the United States and China influence the evolution of transnational organised crime in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? Although it is becoming increasingly visible, the “global power competition – transnational organised crime’ nexus remains unexplored in national and international scholarship as well as in risk assessments and, therefore, in the policy-making process.

The senseless shooting of Elle Edwards on Christmas Eve shocked the UK. Similar tragedies in the UK often have their origins in the supply of illicit firearms from Europe. To stem and turn the tide against gun violence, we must look towards Europe.

Contrary to common thought, warzones are not always disorderly scenarios without rules. In most cases, the ways in which citizens must behave in a warzone to avoid being punished is very clear. However, in these afflicted territories it is often the armed groups, and not the states, who largely determine these norms. These social orders constructed through violence have previously been considered ‘criminal’ or ‘rebel’ governance. In this article, we will theorise a new term: armed governance (AG).