Confronting the organised crime pandemic

RIO DE JANEIRO — Transnational organised crime is a paradox: Ubiquitous yet invisible. While criminal tactics evolve rapidly, government-led responses are often static. When criminal networks are squeezed in one jurisdiction, they rapidly balloon in another. Although the problem concerns everyone, it is often considered too sensitive to discuss at the national, much less the global, level. As a result, the international community — including the United Nations and its member states — lacks a coherent and coordinated strategy to address it.

That needs to change. Cross-border organised crime constitutes a major threat to peace, security, human rights, governance, the environment and sustainable development. According to the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, over 80 per cent of the world’s population resides in countries with dangerously high levels of criminality. But, while there appears to be growing awareness of the problem, responses are still reactive, fragmented and under-funded.

Transnational organised crime — from drug trafficking and people smuggling to the sale of counterfeit goods and cybercrime — reaches into most cities, neighbourhoods and homes. In the United States, over 90 per cent of the $1 banknotes in circulation are tainted by residual traces of cocaine and other drugs. In India, 66 per cent of people claim to have fallen victim to online scams.

Bottom of FormYet, for all its pervasiveness, organised crime is frustratingly hard to quantify. There still is no globally agreed definition of the term, nor are there strong incentives to encourage international cooperation against cross-border criminality. In the meantime, criminal actors and behaviours are spreading from the underworld, infiltrating government institutions, private businesses and everyday interactions.

A perfect storm

While antecedents of transnational organised crime can be traced to pirates and privateers in past centuries, the phenomenon has exploded since the end of the Cold War, owing to three broad trends.

The first is globalisation — the growing interdependence generated by cross-border flows of goods and services, investment, people and information. The expansion of trade, deregulation of capital and spread of tax havens and special economic zones meant that criminal groups could reach new customers around the globe, leverage global supply chains and exploit some countries’ lax banking regulations. When border controls have been tightened, as in recent years, transnational criminal networks have reaped even greater profits, because they are paid extra to move illicit goods to meet demand.

Meanwhile, digitalisation is also accelerating the spread and influence of organised crime by helping bad actors reach new clients and victims. The spread of the Internet, cloud computing, encryption, and AI has dramatically lowered the costs of crime by making it easier to evade law enforcement and hop from one jurisdiction to another. New technologies are also giving rise to innovations ranging from 3D-printed firearms and synthetic drugs — often traded in illicit markets on the darknet  — to new online scams. Criminal syndicates are scaling up automated online attacks, sharing tradecraft, exploiting new cyber vulnerabilities and laundering the proceeds.

Lastly, rising geopolitical tensions have further amplified the threat and complexity of cross-border criminality. Violent conflicts, economic disputes and deepening domestic polarisation are distracting governments from a comprehensive approach to combating transnational organised crime. At the same time, increased global competition has weakened governments’ incentive to cooperate, even on shared threats, such as climate change, pandemics and crime. Making matters worse, heavily sanctioned governments — Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela — are directly and indirectly colluding with criminal actors and intermediary networks, while scouring black markets to source everything from minerals to microchips.

Of course, there are other drivers of transnational organised crime beyond these three big trends. For example, rising inequality is a major enabler because of how it can undermine the rule of law and fuel corruption. International ethnic, cultural, and linguistic networks can foster “criminal trust” to facilitate cross-border trafficking of illicit goods. External shocks and stresses like economic sanctions, financial crises, pandemics and climate change can also influence criminal markets.

A big business

Despite widespread agreement that transnational crime is worsening, mistrust among governments is degrading the international crime-control regime. There has been little evolution in governance since the 2003 Convention against Corruption and the 2000 Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, with its three protocols on trafficking in persons, migrant smuggling, and firearms. Progress at the UN in recent negotiations toward a cybercrime treaty has been challenging, owing to deep disagreements about the treaty’s implications for human rights, among other issues.

While varying in intensity from place to place, the trafficking of drugs, firearms, and people (including migrant smuggling), as well as environmental crimes, trade in wildlife and counterfeit products, and cybercrime, appears to be increasing. In 2023, Interpol described the expansion of transnational organized crime as an “epidemic” requiring coordinated law enforcement “across every region”. And in April, the European Union characterised the problem as “one of the biggest threats today”, and a “major threat to the internal security of the EU”.

Though difficult to measure, the ecosystem of corruption, money laundering, and shadow economies that enables organised crime has likewise expanded. The EU estimates that at least two-thirds of all criminals engage in corruption on a regular basis, and that over 80 per cent of criminal networks make use of legal business structures. These challenges are hardly confined to Europe: two-thirds of all countries have “serious” problems with corruption, and have shown little or no progress in addressing it.

Organised crime generates wide-ranging negative externalities, not least because it is among the world’s biggest businesses, bringing in as much as $4 trillion annually. If the economic costs of cybercrime (in 2022) are added, that figure triples to $12 trillion. Moreover, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that 2-5 per cent of global GDP is laundered each year, reflecting the extent to which legal and illicit economies are intertwined through clandestine financial transfers, dubious investment vehicles and legitimate businesses.

For a more local perspective on the economic costs of organised crime, consider that Colombia’s output of illicit drugs is valued at $18 billion, rivaling oil and gas as the country’s main export. According to Brazilian authorities, contraband, piracy, theft of water and electricity, and tax fraud alone cost the economy roughly $85 billion per year. And cybercrime reportedly generated $320 billion in losses to the US economy last year, though this is almost certainly an underestimation, given the low reporting rates of such incidents.

Far from standing still, organised criminal networks are busily growing their markets and becoming more transnational. Having evolved quickly during a period of rapid globalisation, they are enmeshed with legal businesses and adept at just-in-time delivery, near-shoring production to evade detection, and diversifying their supply chains to manage risk.

Some criminal groups are also expanding into new products and services. Brazilian, Colombian, Mexican, and even Balkan drug-trafficking groups operating in the Amazon Basin have entered new markets, like Chile and Ecuador, and entirely new sectors, such as logging and gold mining. Meanwhile, crime syndicates in the Golden Triangle (comprising parts of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos) have moved from localised gambling to so-called “pig-butchering” operations (e-mail/online money scams in which unwitting victims are “fattened up for the slaughter”) involving tens of thousands of trafficked people.

Whac –a-mole

The rapid spread of criminal networks with diverse portfolios is overwhelming the capacity of most national-security and law-enforcement authorities. And these crime groups are not just proliferating; they are also splintering. The growth of transborder criminal markets, lower barriers to entry, and the COVID-19 pandemic have fueled a surge of new players looking to get in on the action. From Afghanistan and Iraq to Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, hundreds of criminal groups often compete and collude to gain market share. As of this year, Europol believes there are at least 820 criminal networks with more than 25,000 personnel operating across the EU.

Some of these syndicates are adopting franchise models, having already replaced a hierarchical structure with a network structure. Many criminal organisations de-centralise and sub-contract services, such as targeted assassinations, cybercrime operations, or the trans-shipping of cocaine and synthetic drugs. Meanwhile, aggressive law-enforcement responses — including “kingpin” (targeting the top leader) and “mano dura” (zero-tolerance) strategies — have had unintended consequences, often breaking groups up into smaller, hyper-violent factions. Instead of a handful of consolidated global crime organisations — the Italian mafia, Chinese triads, Colombian cartels, Japanese Yakuza, or Balkan syndicates — we are left with dozens of “super cartels” and thousands of smaller players.

Making matters worse, organised-crime groups are infiltrating and subverting national and subnational governments, as well as legitimate businesses. A combination of cartels, mafia, gangs, militia, and other groupings are alternately competing against, colluding with and in some cases, capturing state institutions. It is not just the security, justice, penal, and customs agencies that are being targeted; so, too, are critical infrastructure, public procurement, service providers and even intelligence agencies.

Savvy crime syndicates are using multiple strategies to expand their power — intermediating with governments, entering into joint ventures, using terrorist tactics, or supplanting governance altogether. The criminal underworld is coming out of the shadows to select candidates, target opponents, finance campaigns, and otherwise influence electoral outcomes. Ironically, when politics itself becomes criminalised, support for populist and authoritarian leaders promising to “get tough on crime” can feed a vicious cycle that further entrenches the power of organised crime.

Some governments are also directly or indirectly sourcing products and services from the global criminal marketplace, and others have fully blurred the lines between politics, business, and crime. Authoritarian leaders overseeing “state organised crime” hire hitmen, recruit professional money launderers, deploy private mercenaries, and retain hackers to attack dissidents and steal everything from Bitcoin to gold. In 2023, the head of the UK National Crime Agency belatedly highlighted “the emerging links between serious and organised crime and hostile states”, citing North Korean-backed hackers and cybercrime groups employed by Russian authorities.

Unfortunately, these governments’ involvement in nefarious criminal activities makes it even more difficult to create strategic partnerships and manage escalation risks through global and regional bodies.

It’s complicated

An inconvenient truth complicates matters further: Organised crime frequently generates perverse benefits and public goods for large segments of the population in some countries, especially those experiencing high levels of inequality, poverty and corruption. The leaders of some organised crime groups are often viewed as “heroes” in the deprived local areas where they operate.

Rather than conceiving of organized crime as a social aberration, then, it may be more appropriate to understand it as a rational pursuit of material gain through predation, competition, collusion and capture. This is certainly the case in those parts of Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and South Africa where state penetration is weak. Criminal groups can sustain vast informal economies and deliver a wide range of essential goods during emergencies. In other economically marginalised urban and rural areas, millions of people depend on informal and illicit economies for basic services — from security to electricity and internet access. In Mexico, cartels are considered the country’s fifth-largest employer, boasting as many as 185,000 recruits.

Most importantly, organized crime is generating exceedingly high levels of violence. A significant share of reported homicides — as much as 90 per cent in some Latin American and Caribbean countries — is linked to it, especially in cities. Impunity is widespread. Not surprisingly, in countries registering comparatively high or rising levels of such violence — from Ecuador and Brazil to Belgium and The Netherlands — organised crime is the top concern for voters. In Europe and other regions, the growth of organised crime has become a galvanising issue for right-wing parties.

Yet violence is just the tip of the iceberg. While cartels, militia, and gangs routinely instrumentalise bloodshed to secure markets and protect territory, an even larger share of organised crime is non-violent. Extortion, intimidation and fear also generate ripple effects that undermine livelihoods, the quality of services, trust in digital spaces, the legitimacy of police and justice institutions, and the foundations of democratic governance. Non-violent cybercrime poses a serious threat not because it will cause physical injury, but because it undermines confidence in the online environment, destabilises financial systems and disrupts critical services.

Precisely when global coordination is urgently needed to counter transnational organised crime, multilateralism has become increasingly problematic. Global responses that should be comprehensive, decisive, and swift are instead derailed by disagreement and distrust. Notwithstanding the occasionally spectacular takedowns of criminal networks by the likes of Interpol and Europol, the current international approach is woefully insufficient.

In the absence of a global strategy, ad hoc regional approaches targeting specific types of organised crime have taken shape. While some countries and intergovernmental organisations are launching alternative informal arrangements to tackle specific types of transnational crime, most others are resorting to unilateral, reactive solutions. There is limited global cooperation to identify emerging trends and threats, much less international strategies to adapt to them.

Renewed multilateral cooperation will not occur spontaneously. It will require concerted efforts to map the evolving landscape of transnational organised crime, identify converging interests, and restore trust and reciprocity. At a minimum, collective action requires a shared understanding of the evolving threats, which call for differentiated law enforcement, criminal-justice and prevention strategies at the global, regional, national and local levels.

Another challenge is to build and sustain trust between police, justice officials, human-rights groups, and development institutions, so that all can experience the benefits of cooperation. Only then will it be possible to sustain whole-of-society and whole-of-government efforts to dismantle transnational criminal networks. Squarely addressing the underlying structural challenges that enable organised crime — from poverty and inequality to lax financial regulations and tax havens — is critical, as is investment in building resilient institutions and communities.

The UN has a pivotal role to play in helping to renovate the global crime-control regime. It can leverage its convening power to work toward a global consensus, strengthen governance, broker partnerships, and highlight the dividends of multilateral cooperation. The UN Security Council took an important step when it made the issue a top priority in 2023. But the UN can go further by crafting a common strategic approach across member states, agencies and civil-society partners.

International and regional entities such as the G20 also need to acknowledge the diverse and growing threats posed by transnational organised crime, and advocate for comprehensive strategies and the use of new technologies. Multilateral development banks and the private sector have a role to play as well, from strengthening anti-corruption measures to reporting when industries are the victims of crime.

By the same token, governments need to improve intelligence-sharing and shift from a narrow law-enforcement and criminal-justice lens to accommodate a wider range of preventive strategies targeting corruption, money laundering, and the shadow economies in which organised crime thrives. A strategy that is not comprehensive is no strategy at all.

Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Igarapé Institute and the SecDev Group, is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Cities of Tomorrow and an adviser to the Global Risks Report. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2024. 

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