Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CRIMTANG (Criminal Entanglements.A new ethnographic approach to transnational organised crime.)
Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2022-07-31
Our research project thus works using an approach that is both ethnographic and transnational-by-design, making it uniquely well-equipped to unearth the social dynamics of TOC. More specifically, it explores the illegal movement of people and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe along a key trafficking trajectory connecting Tangier, Barcelona, Paris and beyond. Rather than looking at TOC from on high, or chasing an insight into the issue in national registers and institutional regimes, we approach TOC in a bottom-up manner. By following these criminalised movements from Morocco into Spain, then France and all the way to the streets and social settings in which transnational organised crime is inevitably entangled, the project travels with the phenomenon under scrutiny, affording us grounded and informed insight into a critical contemporary issue as well as the possibility of rethinking academic approaches to the issue. In so doing, the project will:
1) Empirically shed light on new ground via the ethnographically informed study of TOC.
2) Theoretically develop novel insights into TOC through a focus on ‘social entanglement.’
3) Methodologically add to our study of TOC through transnational and collaborative fieldwork.
4) Institutionally advance and consolidate the European research environment on TOC by generating a research centre for global criminology at the University of Copenhagen. The only one of its kind in the world.
In relation to these goals CRIMTANG conducts fieldwork along the so-called western trafficking corridor. It looks at cities that have developed into primary trafficking nodes for the illegalised movement of cocaine, hashish and people, and clarifies the movements and flows that tie them together. The periods of fieldwork will produce new knowledge of these flows and their entanglement, just as they have the potential to clarify some of the less obvious social and political dimensions of the trade in question.
Theoretically, CRIMTANG focusses on social entanglement. It looks at the way legal and illegal formations interact and intersect. This entails developing an analytical framework that will enable us to look at the way political developments impact criminal flows and vice versa; the way social networks and formations interact; and the manner in which people move in and out of such formations and flows. Seen from the outside, our analytical approach is thus attentive to the ways such flows operate between orders, in border zones and the negotiated spaces between the legal and the illegal. Seen from within, it looks at the lifeworlds of people who are engaged in criminalised activities and become entangled in such illegal developments.
Methodologically, CRIMTANG thus strives to further the field of ethnographic criminology. It advocates an approach to criminology that works from the bottom up and substantiates its theories via first-hand empirical insights and ethnographic evidence. This will be done via the organisation of a range of workshops and seminars exploringon the methodological potentials and challenges of such an approach under the auspices of ‘the Centre for Global Criminology’ (cgc@ku.dk) the institutional structure built via CRIMTANG, at the University of Copenhagen. It is ourambition that CGC will become an international research hub for the field of contemporary ethnographic criminological investigations of transnational flows and formations more broadly.
April 2018: pilot fieldwork, Tangier, Morocco
September-November 2018: Fieldwork, Tangier, Morocco
August-October 2019: Fieldwork, Barcelona, Spain
September-November 2020: Fieldwork, Lisbon, Portugal