Rethinking Intersections of Crime and Terrorism: Insights from Political Economies of Violence

The post-Cold War environment has ushered in an era of threats from terrorism, organized crime, and their intersections giving rise to the growing literature on the so-called crime-terror nexus. This article takes stock of this literature, assesses its accomplishments and limitations, and considers ways to deepen it conceptually, theoretically, and empirically. To challenge assumptions informing the crime-terror studies and suggest avenues for future research, the article draws on ideas from the scholarship on political economies of violence. These insights are used to probe the (1) non-state actors that form the crime-terror nexus, (2) conditions under which the nexus is likely to emerge, and (3) varied effects of criminal-terrorist intersections. The article emphasizes the ties of criminal and terrorist groups to local politics, society, and economy, and relationships of competition, rather than cooperation, which often characterize these ties. The conditions under which these groups operate cannot be understood without considering the role of the state in criminal-terrorist constellations. The structure of resource economies influences both the preferences of terrorist groups for crime and the consequences of terrorist-criminal convergence, which are also mediated by state participation in crime.