From Financing Needs to Criminal Terrorism: the Role of Terrorism Financing in the Crime-Terror Relations

Different common elements between organized crime groups and terrorist organizations have facilitated their cooperative relationships along different periods or recent history. These relations have been adapting and varying as a result of the evolution of the international global system and changes in the characteristics of its actors. Among the different factors such as the information and communication society or the increase in fragile states, this study addresses the role that the evolution of terrorists financing and the continuous decentralization of criminal and terrorist organizations have had in the crime-terror relations and its intensification. Terrorists financing needs and trends as well as their reactive evolution in relation to counter terrorism financing measures and strategies, have contributed to redefine the nature and dimension of the relationships between these two violent non-state actors’ and even to create context specificities in the typologies of the relations. This work deeps therefore into the impact of financing in the global logic of cooperation between terrorist groups and organized crime as well as the contextualization of its manifestations in different regions.