CORDIS

According to the UNODC, ‘transnational organised crime’ (TOC) is estimated to generate 1.5 per cent of global GDP. That is more than six times the amount of official development assistance, and the equivalent of 7 per cent of global trade. In short, TOC is both big business and a big problem – the smuggling of people and drugs are the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world. However, despite the magnitude of the problem, our knowledge of TOC remains fragmented and partial. We may have an idea of its scope and numerous assessments of its seriousness, yet the way that TOC is anchored in social flows and formations remains sparsely explored. CRIMTANG seek to amend this lack of knowledge by researching the underlying social and cultural logics of such criminalised flows. While the illicit and illegal nature of the phenomenon has traditionally obscured its finer details – as the people involved actively seek to mask their relations and activity – a field-based ethnographic approach allows us to illuminate the dynamics at play and gain an insight into the lives of the people involved, their social environments and relational landscapes.

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