The greed thesis and crime-conflict nexus literature provide a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between organised crime and violent conflict. However little is known about how organised crime during civil war affects peacebuilding once the war has ended. Organised crime is becoming increasingly recognised as an important element in a wide range of post-conflict security threats (Zyck and Muggah 2015). The international policy-making community (for example, Bosetti et al 2016; Cockayne and Pfister 2008; The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime 2016; Kemp et al 2013; Von Einseidel 2013) has recently started to acknowledge the need to respond to organised crime during peace operations and peacebuilding. A handful of academic studies, too, have begun to address the impact of organised crime on peacebuilding (Cockayne and Lupel 2011; Cockayne 2013; Benedek et al 2010 and Wennmann 2014). This paper asks why organised crime persists into post-war contexts and how it can present obstacles or even opportunities for peace? The paper makes a novel conceptual contribution to the study of organised crime and peacebuilding by developing the notion of a ‘peace-crime nexus’. It illustrates how organised crime acts as a catalyst or hindrance for peacebuilding efforts and how, in turn, peacebuilding changes the dynamics of organised crime. This argument uses evidence from prominent cases which have experience of dealing with organised crime during peacebuilding (South Africa, Northern Ireland, Colombia and Lebanon) to analyse the different levels and causal directions of the intersections between conflict, peace and organised crime. In the process, it illuminates the complexities of the relationships between organised crime and peacebuilding and builds the case for internal and external actors to adopt a holistic and non-traditional approach to managing organised crime after civil war.
