Rethinking the Real Politics of Organised Crime in an Era of Growing Scarcity

Abstract

This panel examines the ‘real politics’ of organised crime in an era marked by intensifying scarcity, insecurity, and socio-economic fragmentation. Across the globe, criminal organisations are expanding not only in scale and scope, but also in the range of political, economic, and social functions they perform. Declining international development assistance, accelerating climate change, and the scarcity-producing effects of violent and protracted conflicts are reshaping livelihoods, governance, and expectations in many parts of the world. These dynamics intersect with long-standing inequalities, environmental stress, and demographic pressures to create conditions in which organised crime increasingly operates as both an economic strategy and a source of protection, governance, and belonging. Yet despite growing recognition that organised crime is deeply embedded in political and social systems, the real politics of organised crime remain understudied and underutilised in practice. The panel seeks to move beyond conventional framings that treat organised crime primarily as an exogenous phenomenon. Instead, it foregrounds the 'real politics' of organised crime: the everyday negotiations, bargains, and power relations through which criminal groups interact with communities, state actors, and socioeconomics. As development aid contracts and state capacity is stretched by conflict and climate-related shocks or social divisions, criminal groups often step into gaps left by weakened public provision. In many settings organised crime may both rival and complement state authority, providing employment, regulating access to scarce resources such as land, water, fuel, and food, as well as resolving disputes, delivering security, and mediating relationships with state institutions. These activities can generate forms of legitimacy and social embeddedness that complicate simplistic distinctions between legality and illegality, or between state and non-state authority. Drawing on new empirical research from a range of regional and political contexts, papers in the panel explore: how organised crime is actively reshaping political settlements - the formal and informal agreements that underpin political order, resource distribution, and authority. Contributions examine how criminal groups are incorporated into, excluded from, or strategically tolerated within political settlements, and how these dynamics evolve in contexts of fiscal austerity, armed conflict, and environmental stress. Particular attention is paid to how scarcity, whether driven by long-standing socio-economics, climate change, conflict-related displacement, or reductions in external support, intensifies competition over resources and influences the ways in which criminal actors position themselves as indispensable intermediaries, service providers, or brokers of stability. The panel also engages critically with existing policy approaches to countering organised crime. By situating criminal activity within broader political, economic, and environmental structures, it highlights the limitations of technocratic, enforcement-led responses that fail to account for local political realities and scarcity-driven incentives. The panel questions the way policymakers currently think about political will when it comes to reforms, and participants will consider what a political settlements lens reveals about why certain counter organised crime interventions falter, generate unintended consequences, or reinforce existing power asymmetries, while other reforms succeed, sometimes against the odds.

Title	Details
The Politics of Reform in Efforts to Reduce Security Sector Involvement in Organised Crime	View Paper Details
The Role of Political Will in Shaping the Use and Effectiveness of Sanctions Against Organised Crime	View Paper Details
The Real Politics of Responding to Organised Crime	View Paper Details
Corruption, Organised Crime and Functionality: The Growing Risk of Policy Fratricide	View Paper Details
Criminality and New Cycle of Violence: Evidence from Colombia	View Paper Details