A Crime–Terror Nexus? Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality¹

Discussing Concepts of Terrorist Rationality: Implications for Counterterrorism Policy

“…Hezbollah, for instance, has started smuggling methamphetamine and cigarettes (Sanderson, 2004: 51;Shelley et al 2005: 36). Al-Qaeda cells in Spain and Italy and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka financed their activities through the use of credit card fraud, while al-Qaeda was furthermore active in smuggling commodities such as diamonds (Shelley et al, 2005: 36;Hutchinson andO'Malley, 2007: 1097). The Irish Republican Army (IRA) took on the methods of criminal gangs smuggling livestock and cars (Dishman, 2001: 48).…”

“…Secondly, terrorists aim at political change while criminals try to keep the status quo beneficial to their illegal activities (Sanderson, 2004: 55;Gupta, 2008a: 148). Finally, criminals try to avoid media and public attention, while terrorists desire such attention for the purpose of making their cause known (Hutchinson andO'Malley, 2007: 1100). The offered criteria may lack completeness but nevertheless show that a distinction may be possible.…”

Networks, terrorists and criminals: the implications for community policing

“…The concern with the growing connections between terrorists and criminals-and in more recent years, between criminal networks and terrorist networks-has (since the early 1990s) identified the end of the cold war and the decline of state sponsorship (see for example [13,26,31] Hamm 2005, [24]) 1 as the major structural change within the international system. This change has been responsible for the increasing turn to criminal activity by terrorists in order to replace the lost revenue previously supplied by states to groups who were seen as proxies for the battle between East and West.…”

Terrorism and Social Movements; Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd Edition

“…As a growing number of organizations collect an increasingly large proportion of their resources from criminal activities, a body of scholarship has emerged examining the nexus between crime and terrorism (Hutchinson and O'malley 2007;Wang 2010). Dominated by small-N analyses, this research worked to conceptualize the variable relationships between criminal organizations and terrorist organizations, and develop theoretical frameworks to help distinguish between these two realms of activity.…”