03 Section B Option 1, Key question 2 - Global organised crime and green crime (part 3)

Organised markets across borders

Global organised crime involves coordinated criminal activity with connections across national borders.

Organised crime involves people working together over time rather than meeting by chance to commit a single offence. A useful legal reference is the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime: its definition of an organised criminal group requires at least three people, some continuing organisation, serious offending and a financial or other material purpose. It does not require a fixed hierarchy. This is a particular international legal definition, rather than a definition of every sociological use of organised crime. UNODC explains the Convention's definition.

Drug trafficking, trafficking people for exploitation and laundering criminal proceeds can connect several countries. Money laundering means concealing the criminal origin of money so that it appears legitimate. It helps offenders use profits without making their source obvious. Not all organised crime is transnational, and a transnational operation need not operate in every region of the world.

Globalisation is the growing connection of societies through flows of goods, money, people and information. Criminal markets can exploit some of the same transport and communication systems as legitimate businesses. Demand in one country may make supplying a prohibited product from another profitable; intermediaries connect production, movement and sale. People can be moved and exploited, goods transported and payment transferred through different places. These are related flows, not necessarily the work of one organisation controlling the whole chain.

Consider an original teaching example: an established group obtains prohibited goods in country A, uses a shipping contact in B and sells to buyers in C. This is organised because participants coordinate roles repeatedly for profit. It is transnational because the supply chain crosses borders. The buyers' demand in C matters to the explanation just as the suppliers' activities in A do; blaming the country of origin alone misses how the market works.

Global opportunities and local networks

Global connections expand criminal opportunities, but local relationships and inequalities help explain how those opportunities are used.

Digital communication can connect recruiters, customers and intermediaries at a distance. Online fraud illustrates why the location of an offender need not be the location of a victim. The UN Human Rights Office's 2023 briefing on Southeast Asian scam operations describes links between online fraud, money laundering and trafficking people into forced criminal activity. It documents concerns arising from 2021 onwards; it is not a census of all cybercrime or an estimate of conditions today. Someone carrying out a scam under coercion may also be a victim of trafficking. Treating everyone visible in a criminal operation as an equally free decision-maker obscures exploitation. OHCHR's dated briefing.

The explanation has several steps: communication allows coordination over distance; a wider potential customer or victim pool increases opportunities; and separate national jurisdictions can make investigation harder. A jurisdiction is the area or matter over which an authority has legal power. Investigators may need evidence held abroad and cooperation from another country's authorities. Different laws, resources and willingness to cooperate can obstruct that process. Borders therefore create challenges for control even when offenders use networks that cross them. International cooperation can also use global connections, so technology does not make enforcement impossible.

Inequality can shape participation. Where secure livelihoods are scarce, a recruiter may exploit a person's need for work; where consumers have substantial purchasing power, demand may support profitable illicit markets. These are mechanisms to investigate, not claims that poverty automatically causes crime or that poorer countries are inherently criminal. People with money, professional expertise or access to legitimate companies can also provide valuable services to criminal markets.

Hobbs and Dunningham (1998) question whether describing crime as transnational explains enough, arguing for attention to its local manifestation. Their argument challenges an image of a single distant organisation simply imposing crime everywhere. Glocal is a useful term for the interaction of global connections and local conditions. For example, an international supply route may depend on a locally trusted intermediary who knows buyers and can settle disputes. This example applies the argument; it is not a reported incident from their article. The original article's abstract.

A dated indicator shows expansion in one market: UNODC's World Drug Report 2025 estimated global illicit cocaine manufacture at 3,708 metric tonnes of pure cocaine in 2023, nearly 34% above 2022. This is an estimate of production, not a count of offenders, sales or all global organised crime. It supports a claim about that market in that period, rather than proving that every kind of crime grew or that globalisation alone caused the increase. UNODC's 2025 report summary.

Environmental offences and wider harm

Green criminology asks which environmental damage becomes a criminal offence and which harmful activities remain permitted.

This distinction matters because harm and illegality are different questions. Establishing that an activity damages an ecosystem does not by itself establish that a particular criminal law was broken. Equally, absence from crime statistics does not establish that an activity is harmless. Definitions of offences, permitted activities and enforcement arrangements vary between societies and over time.

Rob White (2008) argues that analysis of environmental harm should extend beyond the legal/illegal division. His discussion includes harm to humans, environments and non-human animals and asks how unequal power affects responses. This is a criminological argument, not a survey estimating how many environmental offences occur. It allows examination of damaging ordinary business practices alongside officially prohibited conduct. White's original paper at the Australian Institute of Criminology.