Global: Globally Organized Crime and Network Analysis

Objectives

The course's main objective is to introduce students to organized crime and criminal networks and the policies that states and international institutions implement to tackle this global challenge. Through theoretical and empirical examples, the course aims to give students a better understanding of how criminal networks are organized and performed and how regulatory institutions deal with them.

The course will introduce students to ongoing research on central aspects of criminal networks and bring students up to date on the literature in the field, encouraging active participation and independent thinking in engaging with the issues. This course will give students an overview of the research literature on criminal networks and the fight against organized crime. In addition, the course will introduce social network analysis to offer students the methodological tools for exploring criminal organizations empirically. Finally, the course also aims to teach students about the interaction between criminal networks and other global challenges.

The students will engage will the literature and use a dedicated methodology to understand and reveal criminal networks and discuss the instruments to fight against organized crime.

Content

Criminal networks and organized crime take many forms and are linked to several illegal activities: human traffic, drug and illegal substances, money laundering, and, more generally, white-collar crimes, etc. The course will introduce the nature and characteristics of these organizations/networks, their origins, their functioning, and how states, intergovernmental and international institutions fight against them. We will also discuss the methodologies scholars and practitioners use to investigate criminal networks.

Criminal organizations' structure and strategies vary across time and sectors. Some of the more recent white-collar criminal organizations do not operate in the same way as Mafias engaged in human, drug, and other kinds of trafficking. One significant difference is in the hierarchical structure, with financial criminal organizations lacking a clear-cut top-down hierarchy with clearly established godfathers. The linkages between the members are also looser. This affects the fight against these networks. The course will also discuss the transformations and revamping of old structures.

The course aims to provide evidence-based knowledge and encourage students to participate actively in their learning process. The teachers will thus provide the necessary methodological training for students to explore criminal networks.

A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

The student is able to

• understand the nature and core characteristics of different types of criminal organization.
• understand the challenges for the public sector and international institutions in the fight against organized crime.
• understand how criminal networks interact with other global challenges and the need for a global response
• understand network data and basic network-analytic methods for revealing (and potentially destabilizing) criminal networks   

Skills

The student is able to

• identify, analyze and reflect upon how criminal networks are organized and the instruments used by the public sector and international institutions to fight against organized crimes
• to identify and reflect the challenges it poses for global governance and fair relations between humans, institutions and businesses
• to reflect upon arguments and positions put forward in contemporary literature and debates on criminal organizations from different fields (political science, public administration, law, criminology, etc.)
• to search, find and analyze network data 

General competence

The student can

• critically relate literature, theories and perspective to various empirical situations
• engage in debates on how to fight against organized crime and the need for a global response
• use her/his knowledge of social network analysis to tackle different data
• write analytical texts