This report suggests that framing violent conflict as limited to war and civil war restricts our ability to address it: the approaches and lens of peacebuilding can enrich efforts to reduce armed violence and fragility linked to organised crime. It notes that this approach has not been widely tested, but that when it has, results are promising.
Criminal networks and organised crime are strongly linked to instability and fragility, and not only in ‘fragile states’. The report highlights three dimensions of organised crime and its relationship to armed violence and fragility.
- First, its connection to power holders and political interests poses challenges to governance and statebuilding approaches where the state itself is complicit.
- Second, attention to the incentives that pull and/or push individuals into crime helps us to identify broad-based response strategies.
- Third, globalised market structures in key crime commodities, such as illegal drugs, point to the need to look inwards as much as outwards in their response in countries where high demand sustains the financial flows and profits of organised crime.
Notions of sovereignty can protect state officials complicit in organised crime. Further limitations of current approaches to the problem include the following.
- The emphasis on locking up criminals as a major component of the global response to the problem may exacerbate violence in some cases
- Little headway has been made in reducing the receptivity of fragile contexts to criminal enterprise
- Peacebuilding interventions have yet to adequately frame the issue of organised crime within overall responses to conflict and violence.
Peacebuilding approaches that focus on analysis, dialogue and civic empowerment can help find new ways of addressing what is a highly complex global problem. The report suggests five priority areas for action.
- Conflict-sensitive law enforcement. Law enforcement will remain a key response mechanism to the nexus between organised crime, armed violence and fragility, but it needs to adopt a conflict-sensitive ‘do no harm’ approach.
- Better analysis and information flow across the local, national and global dimensions of organised crime. While there has been a flurry of attention to the issues, large knowledge gaps remain.
- Predatory power holders. Current state-building approaches require a deeper understanding of the role of predatory power holders, including how criminal agendas can be factored into peace negotiations and processes.
- Incentives. A better grasp of the reasons why individuals are drawn into crime is needed. Attention should be given to civic empowerment as well as to targeted livelihood opportunities for at-risk populations.
