CIDCM Logo Motif

Unholy Alliances?

Unholy Alliances?
How Trans-state Terrorism and International Crime Make Common Cause
24 March 2006

by Lyubov Mincheva, Ted Robert Gurr

Trans-state political terrorism is a strategy used in pursuit of ethnonational, religious or revolutionary objectives. International organized crime, in contrast, seeks material gain by smuggling weapons, drugs, consumer goods, and humans as well as by illegal fund transfers. How do these two types of "global bads" make common cause? Under what conditions do politically-motivated terrorists cooperate with international criminal cartels and networks, and vice versa? A major challenge in the building of such an explanatory model is its complex dependent variable demanding explanation for the interaction of two conceptually distinct motives for joint action.

>> Go to paper or report

University of Maryland