Other types of ‘organized’ crime
Organized Crime | Week 5, Lecture 10
April 29, 2026
White-collar crime
- Both organized crime and white-collar crime often involve:
- Planning, coordination, and organization, corruption of public officials, serious harm
- The key distinction:
- White-collar crime: criminal activity that deviates from an otherwise legal enterprise
- Organized crime: criminal activity is the enterprise
For discussion: But the line is thinner than it looks… does the distinction hold up?
- FTX (2022): Sam Bankman-Fried built a crypto exchange that was, in practice, a sustained conspiracy
- …defrauded customers, corrupted regulators
- FTX: a legal firm that went wrong or was fraud the point?
- White-collar crime typically lacks the governance ambition
- What gets labeled as OC has never been neutral
Terrorism
- Terrorism and OC also share tools: violence, coercion, corruption, clandestine organization
- Terrorism: the use of violence against civilians by non-state actors to attain political goals
- Organized crime: violence and coercion to regulate a market and sustain profit
- But terrorism and crime overlap:
- Terrorist groups use criminal activity to fund political operations
- Criminal groups adopt political language to legitimize violence
- Some groups are genuinely both or shift between categories over time
The strategic logic of terrorism
- What makes terrorism analytically distinct is not just the goal, but the strategy
- Terrorism is costly signaling: violence designed to shift beliefs, not (only) extract rents
- Attrition: impose costs until the target concedes
- Intimidation: demonstrate power to punish disobedience
- Provocation: goad the target into overreacting
- Spoiling: undermine peace negotiations
- Outbidding: signal greater resolve than rival factions
- In general, OC coerces to govern a market. Terrorist groups try to change a political outcome
- But if terrorism is a strategy, OC groups can use it too!
Insurgents and paramilitaries
- Insurgents: armed groups that challenge the state claiming a political or territorial objective
- FARC (Colombia), Shining Path (Peru), Taliban (Afghanistan), IRA (Ireland)
- Paramilitaries: armed groups operating alongside or in place of the state
- Often have tacit support of the state, e.g., AUC (Colombia), Interahamwe (Rwanda), KKK
They often look like OC groups because they:
- Tax populations and extort businesses
- Provide governance and dispute resolution
- Corrupt or co-opt state institutions
But their relationship to the state differs:
- Insurgents: claim to be alternative states, not alternative markets
- Recall Tilly: “war makes states”… insurgents are engaged in proto-state building
- Paramilitaries: extend or substitute for the state’s coercive capacity