Organised Crime and Corruption

Third, organised crime generally involves threatened or actual violence, while many forms of corruption do not. The result is that ethics committees in universities and elsewhere have often rendered it more difficult to conduct primary research into the former. Given that contemporary social science is so evidence-based, this has shifted research   towards corruption and away from organised crime. Finally, and arguably most basically, general awareness of the interconnectedness between organised crime and corruption has until fairly recently been low.  

Yet, there is no question that because of corruption the scale of organised crime is much higher than it would otherwise be and that it is vital to attempt to increase our knowledge and understanding of collusion. Some highly influential analysts, including Dennis Blair, the US Director of National Intelligence, maintain that organised crime has become so powerful in some countries - such as certain Soviet successor states, parts of Latin America and China - that it has partly captured the state ¹; state capture is arguably the most dangerous form of linkage between organised crime and corruption.

Fortunately, some of the reasons for the limited analysis of connections between organised crime and corruption are less salient now than they used to be. Thus the push towards more multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinary research in social science has resulted in the publication of collections focusing specifically on these linkages from several perspectives. ²

Moreover, 9/11 led to substantially increased awareness among governments and international organisations of the linkages between terrorism, organised crime and corruption. This has resulted in much closer scrutiny of the related issues of terrorist financing and money-laundering, which in turn has led to a refinement of measurement techniques for both organised crime and corruption. In addition to official legal statistics on both, there is an increasing amount of hard data and research on their economic impact. The emphasis placed by security analysts since the 1990s on so-called soft security has also prompted increased research into organised crime and its connections to corruption: awareness of collusion has been raised by the apparent increase in transnational trafficking – of weapons, drugs and humans. While considerable attention has been paid to the first two of these for several decades, human trafficking has moved rapidly up the research agenda since the 1990s, and a key dimension of this is collusion between corrupt officials and crime gangs.

Current and future research

Despite the inherent problems involved in researching organised crime, corruption, and the linkages between them, recent studies have provided considerable evidence of collusion and its drivers, and have identified particularly high risk areas. The application of various theoretical approaches – rational choice, institutionalism, opportunity structures, psychological, etc. – has encouraged empirical research to test hypotheses and produce new data.

Space limitations preclude much consideration of these here. But among the most detailed analyses are those of police, customs and peacekeeping officers’ involvement with organised crime in various kinds of trafficking.³  Small-N case studies and survey-based research have provided detailed evidence – sometimes hard, sometimes strongly circumstantial - of collusion between politicians, appointed state officials and criminals in areas such as drug trafficking, cigarette smuggling, money laundering and public procurement.⁴    

The definitions and parameters of both organised crime and corruption remain contested. But definitional debates are nothing new, and the focus here will be on five specific aspects of research into organised crime and its connections with corruption that are hot topics.

The first is measurement. The 1990s witnessed the rise of perception-based and attitudinal surveys on both corruption and, to a lesser extent, organised crime. Various criticisms of these led to a search for other measurement tools.  Many saw experiential crime victim surveys as one of the most promising sources for refining our knowledge of the scale and nature of both organised crime and corruption. While experiential surveys also have their limitations – they are typically poor at identifying high-level (elite) corruption, for instance – they continue to make a valuable contribution to our knowledge about corruption and organised crime.

Regarding organised crime, other recent developments include the German police’s ‘organised crime potential’ and Ghent University’s ‘risk-based methodology’⁵ (for an analysis and critique of both see von Lampe 2004⁶ ). Both methods move beyond measuring organised crime in traditional ways, and instead rank-order crime groups.  The first ranks them in terms of their level of sophistication (‘professionalism’), and focuses on structure, operating procedures, scope, areas of criminality and ethnicity. The second includes changing social environmental factors, and assesses the dynamism of risk from crime groups. In addition, progress is being made in measuring specific aspects of

organised crime activity, such as human trafficking ⁷ that also involves corruption. There is also an increasing number of ways of measuring corruption specifically, including tracking surveys, sectoral or regional and individual nation-based risk assessments, and evaluations of anti-corruption methods.⁸  Formal network analysis is being used to study the perceived scale and nature of both organised crime and corruption, and the connections between them.  Nowadays, wisely, the trend is to combine and compare as many of these techniques as possible in our endeavours to better measure and understand organised crime, corruption, and their links.

A second current research topic is mutation, particularly regarding organised crime. Such mutation can occur in different ways. One is for other forms of anti-social behaviour to mutate into organised crime. Thus terrorist groups sometimes mutate into crime gangs once their primary objective has been achieved, or because they have abandoned their attempts to secure that goal. While this is not a new phenomenon - the Triads were originally a Chinese political organisation, but mutated into organised crime in the early twentieth century – many new cases are now being investigated. Mutation into organised crime can also involve corrupt officials, for example former police or military officers that join or establish organized crime rackets. This has been documented particularly in post-conflict and/or transitional societies, although there have also been many cases in industrialised countries. Finally, mutation can also refer to the reverse transition, e.g. when organised crime increasingly seek to engage in licit economic activity.  

A third interesting area for research has been opened when researchers have challenged some of the claims by security specialists about transnational organised crime. They argue that much organised crime is far more of a local phenomenon than is usually acknowledged, and that it does not constitute the international threat some security analysts claim. In order to convey the complex and mixed nature of organised crime – it is expanding at both the local and the transnational level - Hobbs ⁹ referred to its ‘glocal’ nature.  The relative balance and the connections between local and transnational organised crime, and their respective relations with corrupt officials, are still highly contested and under-researched.

Fourth, new research is exploring possible similarities (parallels) between the functions performed by organised crime gangs and those of corrupt officials.  For example, the notion that one of the ‘services’ often offered by organised crime  – protection – can be tested in the context of corruption (i.e. in what ways and to what extent do corrupt officials sell protection?).¹⁰

Finally, there has been a focus for at least a decade on so-called state capture. This term initially referred primarily to the influence that private firms can improperly exert on state officials – mainly legislators and administrators – to pass (or block) and implement laws and regulations that provide advantages for those firms but go against the public interest. More recently, there has been growing awareness that organised crime can also attempt to capture states through corruption of state officials.¹¹

These and other topics will continue to be important to researchers and practitioners in the coming years: the linkages and similarities between organised crime and corruption constitute a dynamic and rich research area, albeit a very complex one. Related efforts will probably only chip away at the problem little by little, but, unquestionably, this research is highly policy relevant and needs to be conducted.  

By Prof. Leslie Holmes*

* Leslie Holmes is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Melbourne and a Recurrent Visiting Professor at the Graduate School for Social Research in Warsaw and at the University of Bologna.  He has authored two books on corruption, and has edited and contributed to two recent collections that relate directly to the focus of this article – Terrorism, Organised Crime and Corruption: Networks and Linkages (2007) and Trafficking and Human Rights: European and Asia-Pacific Perspectives (2010).

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