Routledge Handbook of Transnational

Organized Crime

Edited by Felia Allum and Stan Gilmour

First published 2012
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Routledge handbook of transnational organized crime / edited by Felia Allum and Stan
Gilmour.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Transnational crime. 2. Organized crime. I. Allum, Felia, 1971-II. Gilmour, Stan.
HV6252.R695 2011
364.106--dc22
2011015563
ISBN: 978-0-415-57979-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-69834-1 (ebk)
 Introduction
Felia Allum and Stan Gilmour

Transnational Organized Crime and its Contexts

Transnational organized crime (TOC) is one of the most virulent plagues

of the twenty-first century – a ‘great pestilence’ that we may not always
notice. It is a quiet pandemic that is spreading across the world with
varying degrees of potency and often unnoticed mortality. This is not a
new analogy; many have made parallels with plagues, viruses, cancers
and illnesses. What we have tended to forget is that TOC is not an
extension of a foreign body to the existing system, country or
infrastructure. If anything it is the product of a country’s history, its social
conditions, its economic system, its political elite and its law enforcement
regime. It is a bacterium that lives and is produced in the body and which
attacks and contaminates it. Giovanni Falcone made this point when he
argued that in the Italian case ‘the Mafia is not a cancer which has
spread through healthy tissue. It lives in perfect symbiosis with a myriad
of protectors, accomplices, debtors of all kinds, informers, and people
from all strata of society who have been intimidated or subjected to
blackmail’ (1992: 81). In other words, TOC is produced by its own
context and to flourish it needs accomplices – bankers, white collar
workers or insider dealers to highlight only a few.
TOC is often simplistically seen as entirely a product of globalization.
Thus, it is argued that without globalization there would be no TOC, but
this is far from the truth (Bowling 2009). The picture is more complex and
we need to acknowledge this (see Map I.1). Different forms of crime and
terrorism have existed since the beginning of civilization, since the
beginning of communities living together in a collective society – from
Plato’s Greece, through Caesar’s Roman Empire and Galileo’s Italy, to
Obama’s America. These forms of behaviour have developed and
modernized as society has changed, so that today we are faced with the
modern challenges of TOC and international terrorism. Indeed,
international terrorism, post 9/11, is the top policy priority and has taken
over all the political, economic and social agendas, letting TOC have a
free rein over many activities and territories.

Map I.1 Main Global Transnational Organized Crime Flows.

Source: UNODC (2010: 2).

However, it is important to understand how ‘globalization’ and

‘modernity’ relate to TOC. They have played a key role in its
development and modernizing process. TOC is indebted to globalization,
it is a form of ‘deviant globalization: the unpleasant underside of
transnational integration’ (Weber et al. 2007). Beck refers to TOC groups
as new ‘risks’ (1992) and Forgione argues that ‘they are the other face of
globalization’ (2009: 33), while Giddens (1990) describes them as the
‘sombre’ or ‘darker’ (1990: 7) side of modernity; its discontinuities (1990:
4).
Milward and Raab (2006) elaborate what is meant by these terms
when they argue that ‘while “bright” and “dark” are metaphors, what we
mean empirically is that a bright network is legal and visible and a dark
network is illegal and tries to be as invisible as possible (invisible, at
least, to law enforcement agencies). Visibility refers to the question of
how easy the activity of a network is to discern without serious
investigative efforts’ (2006: 334).
Adamoli et al. describe how globalization has produced ‘dark’ networks
by creating new opportunities:

Market globalisation and the subsequent abolishing of borders,

together with the advantages offered by technological innovations,
have created opportunities for new profits for existing and emerging
criminal groups which have adapted themselves to the new needs of
the market. [...] [Therefore] criminal groups have learned to exploit
the loopholes and legislative discrepancies present in some
geographical areas and they have spread into sectors where the risk
of being arrested and heavily sentenced is relatively low, especially
compared to the attractive economic return.
(1998: ix)

Therefore, TOC is a very real problem as well as an academic

discussion, a journalistic account and a source of fiction. It is a
sophisticated and modern version of crime in a global society. It is a
phenomenon that crosses borders, challenges states, exploits
individuals, pursues profit, weakens economies and destroys civil
society. There exist many visible and invisible examples of this
phenomenon (see Table I.1).

Table I.1 Summary of transnational organized crime problems

Source: UNODC (2010: 16–17).

The philosophy behind this handbook has been to treat and consider
TOC as a plague spreading alongside increasing globalization – the
darker side of modernity. It is an ailment present in all nation states
regardless of their history, political system, economy and civil society. It
is a serious medical condition that cannot be dismissed as a marginal
‘Italian’ problem. Indeed, its presence often has repercussions for the
local community, national government and the international system (Map
I.2).
 Map I.2 The Intersection of Transnational Organized Crime and
Instability.
Source: UNODC (2010: 14).

TOC is a plague that is of international concern, but it is also an

academic debate and practitioner reality. We hope that this handbook
describes the different aspects of TOC and its various contemporary
narratives.

What is Organized Crime? What is Transnational Organized

Crime?
Definitions are necessary and important for any handbook in order to
explain the topic of discussion and the parameters of the analysis.
However, when it comes to organized crime and TOC this task is fraught
with difficulties because, as Savona (1999) points out, ‘traditionally,
attempts to define organized crime have caused much controversy and
contention’ (p. 2). So much so that Rensslaer concluded that ‘organized
crime itself is an elusive phenomenon’ (1999: 1). The same may be said
of TOC.
One of the basic problems is one of semantics: What is organized
crime? Is it crime that is organized, or is there more to it? What do we
understand by ‘organized’? What do we understand by ‘crime’? This is
where different opinions and views appear, which complicate the picture.
Albanese argued that ‘there seem to be as many descriptions
[definitions] of organized crime as there are authors’ (1985: 4). It is
interesting to note that all textbooks (see, for example, Wright 2006;
Abadinsky 1992) and monographs (see, for example, Paoli 2003)
dedicated to organized crime have a section or discussion on definitions
and what is actually being studied. So, we need to try to define the
phenomenon although it is clear that it is a subjective and ideological
exercise and thus, rather problematic.
Kelly argued that ‘the key descriptive elements of [organized crime]
are durability, continuity, hierarchy, multiplicity, violence or the threat of it
and corruption’ (1987: 8). Abadinsky developed these in his list of
characteristics. Organized crime, according to Abadinsky:

1 is non-ideological

2 is hierarchical
3 has a limited or exclusive membership
4 is perpetual

5 uses illegal violence and bribery

6 demonstrates specialization/division of labour

7 is monopolistic
8 is governed by explicit rules and regulations (1992: 5).

A general consensus now exists around these eight characteristics even

though, for example, they do not engage with the notion of gender. What
we can also note is that every country defines the problem differently,
according to its history and its own experiences. For example, there are
some differences of emphasis between the European Union (EU) and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The EU has always
acknowledged how difficult it is to define organized crime and to agree
on a common definition. The European Parliament clearly states this
when it argues that ‘it is a difficult concept to define’.1 When the EU
finally articulated a definition, it stated that organized crime is:2

a structured association, established over a period of time, of more

than two persons, acting in concert with a view to committing
offences which are punishable by deprivation of liberty or a
detention order of a maximum of at least four years or a more
serious penalty, as a means of obtaining, directly or indirectly,
financial or other material benefits.
(Council Framework decision 2008/841/JHA, Official Journal,
11 November 2008, 300/43)

The FBI defines organized crime as:

any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose

primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities. Such
groups maintain their position through the use of actual or
threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and
generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales,
region, or the country as a whole.3

There are still some countries where the phenomenon is not

acknowledged as a reality and thus, is not defined by government or law
enforcement agencies. This puts the problem into context and shows us
how subjective it is. It is easy, therefore, to see organized crime as a
social or political construction.
If the consensus is hard to find for organized crime, TOC faces the
same problem (although, by its eponymous ‘transnationality’, consensus
should be a core feature). Wright makes a distinction between
‘international’ crime and ‘transnational’ crime: ‘if a network operates
primarily from one jurisdiction and carries out its illicit operations there
and in some other jurisdictions it is “international”. It may be appropriate
to use the term “transnational” only to label the activities of a major crime
group that is centered in one jurisdiction but operating in many’ (2006:
23–4).
International organizations have tried to define the phenomenon, even
though the result appears more as a diplomatic definition that covers
everything and does not really clarify exactly what we mean by TOC. The
United Nations (UN) elaborated a definition of TOC in 2000, which is now
accepted worldwide as being the basic definition. It states that:

‘organised crime group’ shall mean a structured group of three or

more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with
the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences
established in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain,
directly or indirectly, a financial other material benefit.
(UN 2000: 5)

and that this becomes ‘transnational’ when:

(a) It is committed in more than one State;

(b) It is committed in one State but a substantial part of its
preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another
State;
(c) It is committed in one State but involves an organized criminal
group that engages in criminal activities in more than one State;
or
(d) It is committed in one State but has substantial effects in another
State.
(UN 2000: 60)

We have argued long and hard about this and have agreed that the
following working definition by van Duyne is a good basic definition from
which our analysis in this handbook is developed: ‘the passing of illegal
goods and/or services over national borders and/or rendering criminal
support to criminal activities or related persons in more than one country’
(van Duyne 2010).4
However, academics and practitioners, as we have already pointed
out, have different agendas and approaches. TOC is a subjective notion
for academics and an objective reality for law enforcers who need to put
a case together to prosecute an individual or group. So how do these
discourses differ?

Academic Discourse

In the academic community, organized crime and TOC are rather

contentious issues. We need to recognize that ‘organised crime exists
both as an objective, measurable phenomenon but also as a subjective
construction’ (Allum and Kostakos 2010: 3). This is very much the case
for TOC – we can see that it is a contested, controversial, confused,
difficult, ill-defined and slippery term. There are four main subjective
problems that puzzle academics when they deal with the task of
analysing TOC.
First, there is still the question of defining TOC, which remains a major
stumbling block for the academic community. But is it an important or
even necessary task? Van Dijck (2007) asks ‘what is in a name?’ Are
labels important? Many academics such as van Duyne (1996) and Dorn
(2009) question the usefulness of such a concept. For example, the
debate of the relationship between the terms ‘organized crime’ and
‘mafia’ is a complex and ongoing one. Armao (2003), however, has
provided a useful approach and starting point by arguing that:

it might be useful [...] to consider and define organised crime as a

genus, including many different species depending on the
geographical and historical context. In other words, we may imagine
a sort of continuum, starting from organized crime in the sense of a
group of individuals who are together to commit crimes of different
types (such as robberies, drug-pushing, etc.), even on a
transnational basis; then moving on to crime syndicates as well-
structured criminal groups with different hierarchical roles devoted to
the search for profits, acting first of all as entrepreneurs; and finally
at the other end of the continuum mafia, as the most specialized
criminal group, also using politics (which means the totalitarian
control of a territory) to obtain politics.
(2003: 28)

But, do we need a definition? Does the lack of a clear definition of

TOC block the possibility of an analysis? Finckenauer has argued that
definitions are of fundamental importance:

the problem of [how] organized crime is defined goes a long way

toward determining how laws are framed, how investigations and
prosecutions are conducted, how research studies are done, and,
increasingly, how mutual legal assistance across national borders is
or is not rendered.
(2005: 68)

Without definitions this would be impossible, but it is clear that agreeing

on a definition is complicated. This handbook tackles that head-on but
also attempts to describe TOC rather than just present its various
definitions.
Second, what elements should we concentrate on? If we look at the
different studies of TOC (see, for example, Farer 1999), we can clearly
see that there are many competing visions which reflect the different
perspectives adopted by researchers. Researchers all use specific
looking glasses with their own appropriate and chosen lenses to address
their research interest. Some are short-sighted, others are long-sighted.
These differences are a direct result of varied educational paths,
experiences and intellectual developments: TOC, like organized crime,
‘is pliant to perceptions, reasoning, culture, power and ideology’ (Allum
and Kostakos 2010: 5). Researchers are not and cannot be neutral as
their opinions and preferences are constructed by their different
experiences, education, disciplines and geographical location, for
example. This explains why economists, political scientists,
anthropologists, lawyers, linguists, sociologists and historians are all
going to view TOC differently. For a long time, organized crime was
studied largely by Americans and Italians, ignoring other forms of
organized crime, so a very narrow and biased focus was in existence.
For TOC, this is no longer the case, but it is important to be aware of the
construction and vision of the phenomenon by different disciplines and
nationalities.
TOC remains a ‘grey’ area of study for the international academic
community. This is not only because it is complicated to define but also
because there now exists a multi-disciplinary community focusing on the
problem from different perspectives, disciplines, countries and schools of
thought. Communication between these different communities at present
is very poor, which means that there remains a lack of communication
and intellectual development in this area. Moreover, it has to be
acknowledged that some academics have more coverage than others,
are more published than others, more listened to and more funded than
others. Thus, it is important to keep this in mind when studying this topic.
Furthermore, relationships between academics and practitioners
remain limited. What are often regarded as useless and thus parallel
worlds develop with little exchange of information and communication of
ideas. This lack of communication about organized crime and TOC is
comprehensible but, at the same time, has become a major stumbling
block for our better understanding of these phenomena, as Stovin and
Davis make clear when they argue that ‘much of the current literature on
organized crime appears to start and stop at a descriptive level with few
empirical studies. This description does not always benefit the
practitioner and rarely informs the law enforcement response to
organized crime beyond describing the criminal network’ (2008: 497).
Third, the theoretical approach adopted influences the type of analysis
produced. In the general study of organized crime, there exist two main
schools of thought that are dramatically opposed. The first is the
predominant economic rational choice approach (also known as
‘property rights theory’ as elaborated by Gambetta 1993; Varese 2001,
2011), which argues that organized crime and mafias are ‘a specific
economic enterprise, an industry which produces, promotes and sells
private property’ (Gambetta 1993: 1). The state does not provide trust
and therefore these organizations become the key provider and
distributor of ‘private property rights’. This approach focuses solely on
these organizations’ role as suppliers of protection (in other words,
extortion). It gives no space to cultural variables but analyses mafia-type
organizations only in terms of rationality, utilitarianism and state of
nature. According to this model, the majority of people who are victims of
extortion willingly enter into this agreement.
The other predominant approach is the cultural approach, which
focuses on local cultural, social, economic, political and historical
variables in order to understand the emergence of organized crime
groups. For example, Ianni and Reuss-Ianni (1972) explained Italo-
American organized crime through its cultural-kinship ties that were the
result of the social and cultural context within which it developed.
 Researchers can generally be put into these two categories although
there are researchers who have adopted other interesting theoretical
approaches. For example, Cressey (1969), who compared organized
crime to a modern bureaucracy or corporation, Paoli to a ‘ritual
brotherhood’ (2003) and Morselli et al. (2007), who used social network
analysis to explain criminal networks such as those involved with drug
importation.
Finally, there is the use (and hijacking) of TOC by politicians to pursue
their own political agenda. Sheptycki makes this point well when he
argues ‘the problematics of immigration, terrorism, and drugs have been
fused together in the discourse of transnational organised crime’ (2003:
131). There has been a sense that if you study and analyse TOC you are
helping to develop a right-wing agenda, because it touches on so many
ambiguous and delicate issues such as immigration, poverty and
unemployment.
Academics do not have all the answers, but they do try to produce a
comprehensive picture although invariably they end up showing just the
tip of the iceberg. It is also important to be aware of how academics
construct their own narrative and agenda according to their own interests
and the resources available. At times they forget some other important
aspects.

Researching TOC

A brief note on researching TOC is necessary – it will provide a rubric

through which to better understand some of the chapters in this
handbook (and elsewhere). Researching organized crime and TOC is
like looking for a needle in a haystack. We can feel it and have some
evidence of its existence but we are not sure where it is hiding, where it
is located, what shape it has and what exactly it looks like. How
successful a study on organized crime and TOC will be depends
essentially on accessibility and use of reliable data. Having access to
reliable data on organized crime and TOC is a challenging problem for all
researchers, especially as it will often involve several different national
law enforcement agencies. In some countries law enforcement agents
are open and willing to share public documents, in other countries this
dialogue appears to be practically non-existent. Establishing a good
rapport with a practitioner, in effect, a gate-keeper, who has access to
useful material, is essential but not easy, and at times time-consuming.
Moreover, often, there exists very little data which could help form the
basis of an in-depth analysis. We must not forget that getting primary
data is difficult and dangerous. Some researchers have undertaken
participant observations (for example, Ianni and Reuss-Ianni 1972; Ianni
1974; Chambliss 1971) but this is difficult to organize. Therefore, there is
often a necessity to rely on police figures and data. This makes it very
difficult to have a well-balanced picture, as Kelly pointed out about
organized crime: ‘social scientists must rely on secondary and tertiary
accounts of organized crime and therefore, cannot independently
evaluate their findings in accordance with scientific methods’ (1982:
220). It is always through the lenses of law enforcement agents.
Cressey highlighted ‘the methodological problems in the study of
organized crime as a social problem’ when he argued that ‘the principal
handicap here stems from the fact that there are no “hard data” on
organized crime’ (1967: 109). Moreover, ‘such phenomena are social-
psychological in nature and, therefore, are readily observable only in the
context of interaction’. Thus, fieldwork is the key to a realistic account of
organized crime but also the main stumbling block: ‘field work depends
to a great extent on complicated and continuous concerns, the most
central of which is how one is seen by others. It is a matter filled with
risks and contradictions’ (Kelly 1982: 219).
Thus, researching organized crime poses some serious questions
about access to data, reliability of data, adopting a police or government
narrative, and personal safety. For example, when Chin et al. (1993)
undertook a study of Chinese gang extortion in New York it became a
‘frustrating’ exercise because ‘business owners were hard to reach, they
were suspicious of people who try to collect information about them, they
were busy with their businesses and they were reluctant to talk about
gangs and violence in their community’ (p. 33). The problem increases
with TOC as we have already noted. This can also be due to a lack of
common definition of TOC, in other words, researchers can be looking at
the same phenomenon but defining it either as a global network or as a
local network that crosses borders. The emphasis of a researcher is
important because it informs the nature of the study and the areas that
are concentrated on. Two different researchers looking at the same
phenomenon may come to very different conclusions about TOC. It thus
becomes very difficult to undertake research of any nature, which means
that we know very little about the true manifestations of TOC. But what
about practitioners?

Practitioner Discourse

As Sheptycki noted, ‘most crime is local in character; that is, most police
work is grounded in relatively small geographic locales’ (1995: 617). And
herein lies the problem – there is a difference between crime (what
criminals do) and police work (what the police do). The fact that police
structures are primarily local in character (Varghese 2010) reflects the
way that the police think about and respond to crime (Gilmour 2008;
Gilmour and France, Chapter 31). This thinking was documented in the
UK, within that broad range of policing paradigms that variously
constitute Intelligence Led Policing (Ratcliffe 2008), by the Association of
Chief Police Officers (ACPO) in its manual of guidance on the National
Intelligence Model (ACPO 2005). The National Intelligence Model (NIM)
divides crime into three distinct areas, based on their geographic spread:

Level 1 is defined as local crime and disorder, including anti-social

behaviour, capable of being managed by local resources.

Level 2 is defined as cross-border issues affecting more than one

police area within a force or affecting another force or regional crime
activity and usually requiring additional resources.

Level 3 is defined as serious and organized crime usually operating

on a national and international scale, requiring identification by
proactive means and a response primarily through targeted
operations by dedicated units. It is also likely to require a
preventative response on a national basis.

By contrast, and to borrow a concept from Latour (1993), TOC is local at

all points regardless of its reach. The analogy being that a railway that
runs from London to Paris can be seen as transnational but insofar as it
travels across London it is also local and has a local impact (Latour
actually said ‘even a longer network remains local at all points’, 1993:
117).
 If TOC is to be seen as a problem for local police to deal with, it must
be re-characterized as a local problem and perhaps be defined from a
perspective outside of the police, although if this is done it should
perhaps retain its criminal character. Aligning TOC even more towards
national security may be more accurate in some eyes (e.g. Bowling and
Sheptycki 2011; Carapiço, Chapter 1) but it will distance it even further
from local policing, towards a centrist solution (as outlined in HM
Government 2010). Returning to the NIM, it is a business model that the
police use to define their operating environment and to make decisions
on how they will resource their response to the threats that are
highlighted. It could be said (and it has been said) that the NIM is a good
description of the police but that it does a poor job of describing the
policing environment, including the criminal networks that constitute TOC
(Smith 2009). This may be because it views the world from the structural
constraints of the police department rather than from the perspective of
the unbounded and global reach of the transnational criminal or, put
more simply, that it gathers the bulk of its information from inside the
police organization (Kleiven 2007) and in effect ‘marks its own
homework’.
Where organized crime is recognized at a local level there is an
emphasis on reductionism, categorization and referral, as local policing
units attempt to define their problems and construct appropriate
responses. The medical metaphor would be diagnosis, prescription and
treatment. To continue the metaphor; whereas doctors have, in many
instances, created absolute methods to identify a wide range of human
ills, there is no similar mechanism for identifying organized crime or its
transnational variant. The broad description contained in the often-cited
Palermo Convention (United Nations 2000) would perhaps equate to the
definition of an epidemic rather than its underlying illness. The effect of
these elements tends to mean that where a crime problem appears to be
bigger than the geographical reach of the police unit that uncovers it, the
problem is referred ‘upwards’ to units with longer arms; just as a GP
would not expect to take on an epidemic but would refer it to the local
hospital or the relevant national agency (here ends the metaphor).
Paradoxically any calls for greater clarity in definition are resisted as
being unhelpful. An open set of general characteristics allows the police
to fit specific cases into broad classes of criminality without the burden of
proving, against an incisive and objective standard, that the suspect is
also part of a transnational organized criminal gang.
However TOC is viewed, the consequences will often turn from the
intense complexity of the general to the intense simplicity of the
inevitable and resultant harm. People are commoditized, families are
broken, neighbourhoods are wrecked, and somehow society must
regulate itself to deal with these harms (hopefully in a manner regarding
rights, and move on). Various attempts at regulation are discussed
throughout the chapters: from local through regional and national to
transnational policing tactics, policies and strategies (note policing, this
includes actors beyond the formal police institutions).
In summary, law enforcement organizations (and in particular local
police units) have difficulty reacting to the ends as well as the means of
TOC.

The Organization of this Handbook

TOC is a phenomenon that is all too often misunderstood,
misrepresented and contested. Editing a handbook on such a topic is a
delicate task. This handbook attempts to redress the balance by
providing a fresh and interdisciplinary overview of the problems and
debates which TOC represents. It seeks to unpackage, unravel and
deconstruct TOC as well as making it an accessible topic by presenting
the different contemporary debates which TOC produces and provokes
(see Figure I.1). What links all these issues is the contentious nature of
TOC, but also the concrete harms that it produces and are felt by society.
There is no agreement about what TOC is. What we have tried to do is
illustrate the complex nature of the phenomenon in a way that is
engaging and accessible.
 Figure I.1 Spider Diagram of Handbook Themes.

The majority of handbooks that cover areas such as crime and policing
remain very discipline based. The innovative aspect of this handbook is
not only its interdisciplinary nature, but also the dialogue between
international academics (young and established) and practitioners
(national and international) that it presents. This handbook is thus, not a
dictionary, not an encyclopaedia, not an edited collection of unrelated
articles; it is not a research monograph and it is not a special issue of a
journal that brings together conference papers.
This handbook seeks to describe the range of discourses and
narratives that exist and are drawn together around the three words
‘transnational organized crime’. And each word in itself presents a
myriad of understandings, perspectives and approaches as well as firmly
held points of view. In other words, the aim of this handbook is to present
the contemporary debates on the subjects of TOC while describing some
of its current aspects.
 When deciding how to present the contemporary debates on TOC, it
became clear that there were some key perspectives that needed to be
elaborated and included. Therefore, you will find some chapters that are
descriptive, others that are interpretive and yet others that present first-
hand experiences. It is important for the reader to engage with the
breadth and depth of the handbook rather than just trying to engage with
the facts and content of one specific chapter, because it is the discussion
between the chapters that provides the essence of any understanding of
TOC. And the readers are invited to construct their own narrative
because, if anything, TOC is local. It is clear that TOC is a forever
changing and evolving phenomenon (perhaps even, phenomena) that
once you think you have understood and described, you take another
look at it and it is completely transformed. In the next couple of years
TOC will continue to be a burning issue, especially the mobility of
criminals and how states and law enforcement agencies deal with this
problem and in its relationship with terrorism.
This handbook is organized into six parts, which present its defining
aspects. Part I is entitled Theories, Concepts, Definitions and Laws. In
this part, TOC is discussed and analysed as a ‘security concept’, as a
‘myth’, as a ‘misrepresentation’ and as a ‘legal’ norm. Through
presenting these distinctive narratives we have sought to introduce the
reader to some of the basic concepts fundamental to engaging with the
debate on TOC. Part II, Origins and Manifestations, explores the
development and many forms of TOC across the continents. It examines
TOC’s different characteristics and discourses in order to provide an
overview of the complexity of the phenomenon and how it affects civil
society and the national security infrastructure of modern nation states.
In Part III, Contagion and Evolution, the apparent diaspora of TOC is
problematized in turn as a social, political, economic and cultural
phenomenon as we explore its spread and growth and reflect upon its
current standing in the world. Within this part, we discuss the various
crossovers between TOC and terrorism in order to illustrate the reach of
one into the other. While we are not saying that they are the same,
neither can we distinguish clearly between them.
Part IV, entitled Intensity and Impact, concentrates on the effects (often
unintended) of attempts to govern and police TOC and its reaction to this
external stimulus. Part V tackles the question of the Governance of TOC.
The chapters here provide an overview of how society, the state and law
enforcement agencies seek to counter TOC from all perspectives. Part
VI, Reaction and Future, seeks to set out the different national
approaches and discourses to fighting TOC while exposing the possible
problems that are being stored up for the years ahead. The reader is
presented with interpretations that will enable a better understanding of
the nature of TOC. In other words, its adaptability, fluidity and ability to
undermine any attempt to control it, and its capacity and foresight to
capture every (and any) opportunity that presents itself.
This handbook could never simply be about facts and figures. TOC is
an idea and a brutish animal. Thus, it is our hope that this handbook will
introduce the reader to some of the basic but contentious discourses,
ideas and narratives that have shaped and influenced our understanding
of TOC today, and to situate these within the wider political context. We
hope to have provided the necessary tools to analyse and recognize the
idea and entity that is TOC. If we have achieved this, then we will have
contributed in some way to the ongoing debate that we very much hope
will continue.

Notes
1 Website, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/comparl/libe/elsj/zoom_in/291_en.htm#1
(accessed 5 July 2011).
2 It has many similarities with the UN’s definition and has incorporated many of its
elements.
3 Website, http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/organizedcrime/glossary
(accessed 5 July 2011).
4 Email correspondence with author.

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