Incapacity, pathology, or expediency? Revisiting accounts of data and analysis weaknesses underpinning international efforts to combat organised crime

Abstract

Organised crime saw swift ascent as a security priority for the international community after the end of the Cold War. High political excitement surrounded the subject of organised crime, accompanied by an apparently bottomless demand for calculations of its magnitude and attendant risks. Over ensuing decades, concerns were repeatedly raised about the limitations afflicting pertinent cross-national data and related analysis. To date, debates about the stubbornly weak empirical underpinnings of UN and EU efforts to combat organised crime have tended to attribute the ultimate source of such limitations to either issues of capacity (political or technical) or bureaucratic self-interest, thereby portraying states essentially as either inadequate or insignificant actors. Drawing on insights from scholarship on the rise of the security state and the political exploitation of policy against organised crime, this paper suggests that the role of states in producing and sustaining the weaknesses of such policy may have been unduly discounted.