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

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.