What question did this study set out to answer?

To examine the outsourcing of covert tasks to organized crime and understand its implications for state responses.

June 13, 2026Open Access

Illicit Outsourcing:Domain, Politics and the Limits of Operational Responses in State-Crime Relationships

Puntos clave

To examine the outsourcing of covert tasks to organized crime and understand its implications for state responses.
Analyzed relationships between criminals and states across four areas: operatives, service providers, weaponization of crime, and funding.
Developed a state-domain matrix for classification and analysis of these relationships.
Drew lessons from stabilisation and counterinsurgency efforts.
Identified new dimensions of state-crime interactions requiring nuanced understanding.
Found existing approaches to irregular warfare insufficient without integrating political considerations.
Proposed establishment of cross-government response teams to enhance engagement with the underlying political economy.

Resumen

States increasingly outsource clandestine and covert tasks to organised criminal actors, from sabotage in Europe to cybercrime financing North Korea, and beyond. This article maps such relationships across four areas - criminals as covert operatives, as professional service providers, crime as a weapon, and crime as covert funding - and develops a state-domain matrix for analysing them. While the research finds much that is new, criminal embeddedness in irregular warfare has been worked through before. Drawing on lessons from stabilisation and counterinsurgency, it contends that purely operational responses are insufficient without engagement with the political economy that sustains these relationships, and proposes dedicated cross-government cells to integrate the response.

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