The criminal activities and operational roles of Australian neo-jihadists: a network perspective

The crime–terror nexus is the convergence of two types of disruptive nonstate group activities, crime and terrorism. The phrase can also be used to refer to cooperation between criminal and terrorist groups. When conceptualizing the crime–terror nexus, it’s helpful to categorize relationships in three ways. To achieve nexus status, groups either collaborate, combine, or convert. The most common presentation of nexus (or hybrid) groups is terrorist “conversion,” when a purely terrorist organization transitions into a more diversified model, rather than criminal groups moving toward political violence (though there are some notable exceptions) or two groups of different types “joining forces.” Responses to the crime–terror nexus have been uneven. Organized crime and terrorism research have traditionally been siloed from each other, with academics, policymakers, and law enforcement specializing in one or the other—an artificial divide that has become particularly problematic given the modern interconnectedness of political and economic systems wrought by globalization. Traditional security thinking is biased against crime–terror convergence because it emphasizes the difference in motivation between criminal and terrorist groups. Adherents have argued that any such relationships would be transactional and short-lived because criminal groups are interested in remaining out of the public eye, while terrorist groups are explicitly interested in drawing attention to themselves. However, this perspective misses both the potential benefits of diversified activities for violent nonstate groups, and the idea that groups can pursue a range of goals simultaneously across different levels of the organization. Notable exceptions to this institutional siloing include “deep web” and “dark networks” research, which have identified criminal–extremist relationships as relying on similar infrastructure and thus persisting over a longer time span. Both law enforcement and researchers should take their cue from this wholistic orientation. Siloing crime and terrorism from one another presents operational problems: while these groups and their activities may move easily between criminal and political violence, states often separate their law enforcement from their military and domestic security agencies, creating bureaucratic hurdles for effective disruption of hybrid groups. A small cadre of researchers, however, have begun to rectify these artificial disciplinary boundaries. Recent literature on the crime–terror nexus can be broadly categorized into four major buckets: the causes and enabling conditions that allow for such interactions, the spectrum of possible relationships, the ways that groups change as they move into the other’s area of operation, and the policy implications for melded groups. Drawing on work across criminology, sociology, political economy, history, and organizational behavior, in addition to political science, we can more effectively map and understand the contours of the crime–terror nexus. Criminally diversified terrorist groups are a distinct security threat because they are more adaptable, resilient, and entrenched than their traditionally resourced counterparts. Further, criminal activity may alter a group’s long-term political goals, making negotiated settlements and demobilization agreements more challenging. By including the crime–terror nexus in assessments, both academics and policymakers can make more accurate assessments of the contours of low-intensity and asymmetric warfare, leading to better policy outcomes, durable institution building, and increased protections for populations impacted by violent nonstate actors.

This paper reviews the nexus between criminal activity and terrorism. This interaction is often called the ’crime-terror nexus’ because of the links between criminal enterprises—including gangs and criminal cartels. Transnational organized crime, terrorism, irregular warfare waged by criminal armed groups, and ‘intelligence-led’ state responses to their interactions are discussed.

Maritime security threats in the East African coastal peripheries are greatly interwoven with local crimes, economies, and socio-political lifestyles. How crimes are viewed, defined, and categorised as legal and illegal by the locals elucidates how the crime-terrorism nexus is contextualised in specific localities along the coastal seafronts. Often, financial-motivated crimes have the potential to go hand in hand with ideologically driven terrorist activities, where both syndicates operate discreetly in these communities. Based on an ethnographic study in Kenya, this article interrogates the local meanings and understandings of criminal activities in peripheral societies to determine how local crimes intersect with terrorism-related activities. The crisscrossing modus operandi of criminal syndicates and terrorist networks provides each other with safe havens, secrecy in operations, and a vulnerable base of supporters in environments where state-citizen relationships are deteriorating.

The crime-terror nexus includes two independent, but related, components. First, it incorporates the straightforward involvement in criminal activities by terrorists as a source of funding, and second, it refers to the linkages between organized criminal organizations and terrorist groups. Indeed, the criminal and political organizations appear to be learning from each other, adopting each other’s tactics and strategies and frequently partner with one another. The crime-terror nexus is directly challenging the security of U.S. and other nations, thus having an in-depth understanding of the crime-terror nexus is the first step toward problem solving.

Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) or more specifically transnational organised criminal activity is organised criminal activity that involves the crossing of international borders. This chapter examines transnational criminal activities and the criminal collaborations that underlie such activities using a network approach. It provides an overview of the network perspective and introduces social network analysis (SNA). The chapter focuses on the application of the network approach and SNA to flows of transnational illicit commodities, the structure of transnational criminal networks, patterns of criminal collaborations, and key players in transnational criminal networks. SNA is a method for the collection, categorisation, and analysis of the network structure that emerges from the ties between all nodes in a network and the patterns that emerge from the interconnections of actors in networks. TOC requires collaborations between actors, primarily due to the complex nature of activities that need to be undertaken, with such activities often spanning across several different countries.

The purpose of this study was to identify the social phenomena of tattoo, which have been of constant interest in our society, through analysis of social networks collected from big data on what the social phenomena implied in keywords emphasized in newspaper articles over the past year. To this end, by analyzing keywords about tattoos that frequently appeared in newspaper articles, we could see what the main interests of social phenomena related to tattoos were. Data on tattoos were collected from newspaper articles over the past year and analyzed how they formed meaning regarding the relationship structure and centrality between the keywords at issue through social network analysis. These findings provide basic data on social discussions and policy directions related to tattoos in practice and discussions related to ways to improve them. This study is an extension from existing quantitative research by analyzing the social phenomena of tattoos through Bigdata and social network analysis. Apart from statistical surveys or subjective qualitative research, we have approached them with content analysis using big data and social network analysis. The conclusion of this study is as follows. First, as a result of analyzing the word cloud regarding tattoos, it was confirmed that “rose” and “300” were the most prominent, and there were keywords that could analyze various other social phenomena. Second, as a result of analysis by connection centrality, it was proved that the social interest and popularity of tattoos increased. Third, as a result of analysis by eigenvector centrality, the popularity of tattoos was proved. It objectified academic research by attempting research from a different perspective from the analysis of research trends and provided visualized research results of readers.

Since the 2011 revolution, Libya has been a state beset by conflict and fragility. Much of the international community's focus on Libya has been on ramifications of this weakness: terrorism, organized crime, and the risk of a crime-terror nexus. However, despite international concerns and ample opportunity for a nexus to emerge in Libya between terrorist organizations and criminal groups, the striking feature of the post revolution years has been the general paucity of engagement between the two types of actors. ISIS attempts in Sirte to profiteer from criminals failed, in part because the group's limited geographic footprint was easily circumventable by criminal actors. In Sabratha, contrasting incentives between ISIS and criminal groups, and the military power of the criminals, enabled the expulsion of the terrorists. In southern Libya, in contrast, AQIM has endured by pursuing a low-key approach, which accommodated local communities and armed groups. The cases presented underscore that Libya, saturated as it is with well-armed actors that depend on the black economy for their funding, is a difficult context to access for foreign terrorist organizations seeking to profit from the country's illicit economy.

The Basque terrorist group Euskadi Ta Akatasuna (ETA), which committed its first assassination in 1968, perpetrated hundreds of attacks during their five decades of activity - until their dissolution in 2018 - resulting in more than 800 deaths. During this period ETA was supported by a vast logistical and financial network and participated in some criminal activities (e.g., extortion and looting) and had occasional interactions with organized criminal groups. In this chapter we aim to measure the exact size (number and financial amount) of these contacts and activities, exploring whether they confirm the existence of a crime-terror nexus in the case of ETA.

Empirical evidence confirms that in Europe there are growing links between criminal organizations (OCs) and terrorist groups (GTs) – known as the “crime-terror nexus”. After the end of the Cold War and, particularly, since global financial operations came under greater control, the financing of illicit and criminal actions has consequently been conditioned. This resulted in greater proximity and cooperation between OCs and WGs not only in fragile states or undemocratic regimes, but in the western democracies themselves. The article also analyzes the content of the judicial sentences on cooperation and collusions between terrorist groups and criminal organizations.

Recently, an exponential growth in the use of social network analysis (SNA) tools has been witnessed. SNA offers quantitative measures known as centralities which allow the identification of important nodes in a given network. In fact, determining such nodes in terrorist networks is a way to destabilize these cells and prevent their criminal activities. Identifying key players is highly dependent on structural characteristics of nodes. Therefore, many approaches rely on centrality metrics to propose various disruption strategies. Indeed, knowledge of these measures helps in revealing vulnerabilities of terrorist networks and may have important implications for investigations. It is debatable how to choose the suitable centrality measure that helps effectively to destabilize the terrorist network. In this paper, we aim to answer this question. We first provide an analytical study where we identify 6 topologies of terrorist networks and discuss the appropriate metrics per topology. Secondly, we provide the performed experimental analysis on five data sets (with 5 different topologies) to prove our analytical conclusions.

Modeling and analyzing criminal and terrorists networks is a challenging problem that has attracted considerable attention in the academia, industry and government institutions, especially intelligence services. Criminals try to keep their communications and interactions uncovered as much as possible in order not to be discovered and resolved. Their success is our society failure and vice versa. Hence, it is essential to thoroughly study such networks to investigate their details. However, incompleteness of criminal networks is one of the main problems facing investigators, due to missing links in the network; and social network methods could be effectively used to analyze and hopefully prevent, avoid or stop criminal activities. Social network analysis can be applied to criminal networks in order to elaborate on good strategies to prosecute or prevent criminal activities. Having all this in mind, our research provides a method to identify hidden links between nodes in a network using the current information available to investigators. The method presented generates networks that represent all the possible hidden links, and the links of these generated networks represent the number of times the two entities are indirectly connected in each relationship type. The method was tested on multiple small terrorism data sets and the results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of finding interesting hidden links. This is a valuable technique in criminal network analysis, because it can assist investigators in finding hidden links in the network and reduce the amount of missing data.

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing activities contribute to economic and environmental issues across the world. Research has been done to leverage technology in the combat against illegal fishing, and methods have been published to enable the use of technology-driven tactics by authorities in charge of maritime monitoring. A challenge in continuing to combat these activities is transshipment, a practice in which transport vessels are used to mask the origins of marine products. This paper proposes a framework to use transshipment encounters as a basis for understanding the criminal networks profiting from illegal fishing by generating a global network of transshipment. The use of a network structure to represent vessels and their relationships enables the use of formal methods derived from social network analysis to interpret the structures of the criminal organizations engaging in criminal fishing activities worldwide. A framework for generating and visualizing this global network is discussed, and strategies to detect criminal activity are proposed, such as the calculation of the criminal centrality metric. This framework utilizes social network analysis techniques on the domain of illegal fishing and can empower law enforcement agencies to investigate criminal fishing operations on a global scale.

We apply statistical relational learning to a database of criminal and terrorist activity to predict attributes and event outcomes. The database stems from a collection of news articles and court records which are carefully annotated with a variety of variables, including categorical and continuous fields. Manual analysis of this data can help inform decision makers seeking to curb violent activity within a region. We use this data to build relational models from historical data to predict attributes of groups, individuals, or events. Our first example involves predicting social network roles within a group under a variety of different data conditions. Collective classification can be used to boost the accuracy under data poor conditions. Additionally, we were able to predict the outcome of hostage negotiations using models trained on previous kidnapping events. The overall framework and techniques described here are flexible enough to be used to predict a variety of variables. Such predictions could be used as input to a more complex system to recognize intent of terrorist groups or as input to inform human decision makers.

Social network analysis for social risks of construction projects in high-density urban areas in China

The purpose of this article is to show the social network analysis as the perspective of human capital evaluation. It presents interrelation between the social and human capital, the brief introduction to social network theory and its analyzing method. However, social network analysis (SNA) is the method to evaluate social capital, the author pointed out the possible SNA metrics essential in the human capital evaluation. The article shows the SNA and human capital in the individual perspective – ego. It provides the idea of the human capital evaluation in broader and more precise way.