RT Article
T1 Incapacity, pathology, or expediency? Revisiting accounts of data and analysis weaknesses underpinning international efforts to combat organised crime
JF Trends in organized crime
VO 24
IS 1
SP 6
OP 22
A1 Xenakis, Sappho
LA English
YR 2021
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1750715651
AB 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.
K1 Security state
K1 Risk society
K1 Foucauldian security scholarship
K1 International comparative analysis
K1 Policy
K1 Organised Crime
DO 10.1007/s12117-020-09387-7