The Changing Face of Organised Crime

(Cathy Haenlein – RUSI) In 2026, the global illicit landscape looks markedly different from that at the turn of the millennium. Changes in technology, geopolitics and international security have altered the conditions under which crime operates. Criminal networks remain highly adaptive and strategically agile, operating through fluid transnational networks, rapidly evolving technological infrastructure and hybrid state–criminal arrangements. The result is a threat landscape that is still only partially understood. By contrast, the conceptual foundations of our policy and operational responses were constructed in a different era. Many remain anchored in frameworks developed with the adoption of the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) over 25 years ago. This came in a markedly different international moment. The near-universal ratification of the Convention reflected a world of relatively stable globalisation, multilateral optimism, and a conceptualisation of organised crime as hierarchical, territorially grounded and commodity specific. Those assumptions are increasingly strained. Today, organised crime is better understood as adaptive, networked and deeply embedded within licit trade and economic systems. Criminal actors operate across blurred boundaries between legal and illegal markets, state and non-state spheres, and physical and digital environments. They exploit not only gaps in governance but also the structural features of globalisation itself – speed, connectivity and mobility. Yet policy and enforcement architectures remain, in many cases, oriented towards a more bounded and legible world. – The Changing Face of Organised Crime | Royal United Services Institute