The Changing Face of Organised Crime

In 2026, the global illicit landscape looks markedly different from that at the turn of the millennium. Changes in technology, geopolitics and international security have altered the conditions under which crime operates. Criminal networks remain highly adaptive and strategically agile, operating through fluid transnational networks, rapidly evolving technological infrastructure and hybrid state–criminal arrangements. The result is a threat landscape that is still only partially understood.

By contrast, the conceptual foundations of our policy and operational responses were constructed in a different era. Many remain anchored in frameworks developed with the adoption of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) over 25 years ago. This came in a markedly different international moment. The near-universal ratification of the Convention reflected a world of relatively stable globalisation, multilateral optimism, and a conceptualisation of organised crime as hierarchical, territorially grounded and commodity specific. Those assumptions are increasingly strained.

Today, organised crime is better understood as adaptive, networked and deeply embedded within licit trade and economic systems. Criminal actors operate across blurred boundaries between legal and illegal markets, state and non-state spheres, and physical and digital environments. They exploit not only gaps in governance but also the structural features of globalisation itself – speed, connectivity and mobility. Yet policy and enforcement architectures remain, in many cases, oriented towards a more bounded and legible world.

The geopolitical context that enabled widespread early-millennium consensus on the fight against organised crime has also eroded. The current international system is more fragmented, competitive and politically instrumentalised. Cooperation on transnational threats is increasingly uneven, and in some cases contested. This shift has profound implications for policy and practice: enforcement is no longer simply a technical or legal challenge, but also a political one, shaped by selective cooperation, strategic divergence and competing security priorities.

These shifts are the focus of a new RUSI Journal special issue, ‘The Changing Face of Organised Crime’. The issue brings together leading scholars and practitioners to examine how organised crime is evolving, how key institutions are responding, and whether existing analytical and operational frameworks remain fit for purpose in 2026.

Against a backdrop of fragmented geopolitics, disruptive technologies and hybrid threats, the contributions reflect a shared concern that organised crime is no longer adequately captured by the prevailing policy and academic vocabulary, with many of our collective approaches struggling to account for the polycriminality, hybrid features and digitally enabled criminal ecosystems that characterise today’s threat environment.

The special issue therefore asks a foundational question: do existing frameworks continue to illuminate the dynamics of contemporary organised crime, or are they increasingly obscuring them? It does so at a moment when states are experimenting with new responses, including the expanded use of intelligence, military and counterterrorism tools against criminal actors, often without a coherent overarching framework. These developments reflect a broader uncertainty about how organised crime should be understood, prioritised and addressed in an era of rapid change.

Taken together, the articles reveal a widening gap between the complexity of the threat and the conceptual tools used to analyse and respond to it. Drawing on a range of methodologies and cases, they challenge prevailing assumptions and point to the need for a fundamental rethink of the frameworks through which organised crime has traditionally been understood.

Charting a Transforming Threat Landscape

The issues above can be understood through multiple lenses. The special issue examines five interlinked dimensions of contemporary organised crime. First, it revisits the relationship between globalisation and organised crime, focusing on how illicit markets mirror the dynamics of the legal economy.

Angela Me and Paolo Campana set the analytical foundation by assessing the extent to which criminological research and policy have kept pace with changes in the threat. They show how criminal organisations increasingly behave as flexible, adaptive systems, adjusting their operations in response to emerging economic, technological and regulatory environments, and expanding rapidly into emerging market spaces. In doing so they outline key priorities for future policy and research.

Anna Sergi’s photo essay complements this analysis, exploring criminal innovation from Calabria to Düsseldorf, Cartagena and Melbourne. By shadowing a member of the modern ’ndrangheta, she illustrates how historically embedded criminal organisations maintain continuity through social and cultural capital, even as they expand their operational reach into global markets. The narrative underscores how tradition and adaptation coexist within contemporary criminal markets.

Alexander Kupatadze extends this focus by interrogating prevailing policy emphases on high-visibility illicit commodities such as drugs and firearms. Drawing on field experience, he argues that this risks obscuring the proliferation of lower-risk illicit activities embedded within legitimate supply chains – activities that are often more resilient, less detectable and more economically integrated than traditional trafficking models.

Together, these contributions show how organised crime is both innovating and transforming, becoming more embedded, adaptive and integrated within global economic systems.

International Frameworks Under Strain

The second section turns to the international governance architecture and the mounting pressures it now faces.

Mark Shaw and Ian Tennant provide a historical and institutional analysis of multilateral responses to organised crime since the adoption of UNTOC. They trace both achievements and limitations, highlighting how institutional inertia and uneven state commitment have constrained adaptative responses to emerging threats. The analysis poses a central question for the future: whether incremental reform is sufficient, or whether a more fundamental rethinking of the existing architecture is now required.

Sir Stephen Kavanagh offers a complementary practitioner perspective, grounded in operational experience of international law-enforcement cooperation. His contribution highlights the practical limitations of coordination in a polycriminal environment, where actors operate across multiple illicit markets and jurisdictions. In doing so, he underscores the tension between formal institutional processes and the speed, adaptability and anonymity of modern criminal networks.

Together, these articles draw attention to the choices states now face. They reveal the uneasy geopolitical space now occupied by intergovernmental mechanisms – and the challenge of reconciling national sovereignty with criminal business models that are inherently transnational. How we negotiate these tensions will test our collective seriousness: whether governments are willing to move beyond managing symptoms and commit to the level of international cooperation the threat now demands.

Organised Crime in a Fragmented Geopolitical Order

The issue moves on to situate organised crime within broader geopolitical dynamics, where the boundaries between state strategy and criminal enterprise increasingly blur.

Magda Long examines organised crime as a structural feature of contemporary geopolitics. Through case studies spanning Russia, China, the Western Balkans and Spain, she demonstrates how criminal networks embed within broader systems of political and economic influence, outlining the profound implications for policy and strategy. The result is a compelling case for an ecosystem approach that shifts attention from groups to the functions they perform, and from episodic disruption to the longer-term task of building resilience.

Heather Marquette and Matthew Redhead develop this theme by exploring the range of ways in which states outsource sensitive or covert tasks to criminal actors. They use a state-domain matrix to map these relationships, and propose more integrated cross-government mechanisms. These include dedicated state actor–crime cells or working groups, bringing together intelligence, law enforcement, sanctions enforcement, foreign policy and development communities.

Matt Ince and I examine the implications for the UK intelligence community, asking whether organised crime remains underprioritised as a strategic intelligence concern. We suggest that its growing entanglement with hostile-state operations and geopolitical competition calls for a reassessment of the status of organised crime within intelligence prioritisation frameworks.

Collectively, these articles challenge the treatment of organised crime as a discrete law-enforcement problem, highlighting instead the need for policy frameworks to situate criminal actors in wider systems of statecraft, influence and strategic competition.

Digital Convergence and Transformation

The blurring of boundaries between state strategy and criminal enterprise is especially evident in the digital domain. Will Lyne, Jamie MacColl and Jason R C Nurse examine the convergence of cyber-enabled criminal activity and state-sponsored operations, showing how fast-paced technological change has transformed digital crime from a niche issue to a national security problem. Their analysis highlights the narrowing capability gap between criminal and state cyber actors, exposing the limitations of frameworks that continue to treat them as distinct threats.

Federico Varese explores the emergence of scam factories and broader forms of polycriminality within cybercrime ecosystems. He shows how contemporary fraud operations are structured around organisational models capable of rapid adaptation across jurisdictions and platforms. He draws on existing work to map the new global geography of cybercrime, with distinct sites of production and specialised territorial hubs underpinning a plurality of digital criminal economies.

Mina Chiang’s fieldwork provides a further empirical window into scam compounds, revealing how coercion, deception and technological infrastructure combine in transnationally organised illicit enterprises. Her analysis underscores how far digital criminality is grounded in physical sites of control and exploitation. In all this, a context-specific understanding of the intersection between physical and digital domains is crucial, with technological change reshaping both criminal markets and the security landscape itself.

Criminal Governance, Democracy and Control

The final section examines how organised crime is reshaping democracy through coercion, suppression and substitution. Robert Muggah explores the politics of criminal governance in Latin America and the Caribbean, showing how mano dura (iron fist) tactics risk weakening public security and democratic institutions. Instead, effective solutions require rebuilding police, judicial and prison systems, while protecting local democracy and rule-based security.

Atta Barkindo draws on extensive research across northern Nigeria to shows how criminal enterprise can become fused with ideology and embedded within local livelihoods. This can create resilient systems of parallel governance in which coercion, legitimacy and survival are tightly intertwined. The analysis highlights the limits of force-centric responses and the need to engage meaningfully with the deeper political economy and ideological foundations sustaining these hybrid systems.

Zora Hauser concludes with a reflection on the implications for European democracies. She warns that misdiagnosing contemporary organised crime risks generating policy responses that are ineffective and potentially destabilising. Drawing on fieldwork in Germany, she highlights the mechanisms through which organised crime embeds in legal institutions – and the need to account for the social and political dynamics of entrenchment in existing frameworks.

Future Directions

While these insights provide important windows into the evolving nature of organised crime, they also highlight persistent analytical and empirical gaps. In particular, future research will need to grapple more directly with the deepening entanglement between state and criminal actors in grey-zone environments, the rapid diversification of digital illicit economies, and the implications of polycriminality for analysis and enforcement. A forward-looking research agenda must also interrogate in greater depth the roles for militaries, intelligence agencies, law-enforcement partnerships and regulatory bodies in tackling a hybrid and adaptive threat.

Significant challenges remain. Technological transformation and uneven data sharing mean that several trends remain only partially understood, while geopolitical shifts are reshaping incentives for cooperation. What is clear, however, is that incremental adjustment is unlikely to be sufficient. The scale and speed of change in the organised criminal landscape demand more fundamental reflection on the conceptual and operational tools used to understand and respond to it.

This special issue seeks to contribute to that process of reflection. By bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives and grounded empirical work, it encourages a reassessment of the frameworks that shape policy and practice. The aim is not to provide definitive answers, but to sharpen the questions that now need to be asked.

Readers can access the full collection of articles in this special issue of the RUSI Journal on the RUSI and Taylor & Francis websites.

© RUSI, 2026.

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