Criminal hands, state ends: State-sponsored assassinations using organised crime
Project Live
PROJECT TEAM
Jessica Davis
Insight Threat Intelligence
Jessica Davis, PhD, is President and principal consultant at Insight Threat Intelligence, providing clients with clear, timely intelligence grounded in her extensive security and intelligence experience. An internationally recognized expert on terrorism, illicit financing, and intelligence analysis, she also serves as President of the Canadian Association for Intelligence and Security Studies. Dr. Davis spent 17 years in Canada’s security and intelligence community, including roles with the Canadian Forces, Global Affairs Canada, FINTRAC, and CSIS. She is affiliated with RUSI, the Soufan Centre, and CSIS (US). She completed her PhD in 2024 and received the 2023 SSHRC Impact Talent award.
PROJECT SUMMARY
The project examines how governments exploit organised crime networks to carry out assassinations. The project explores an increasingly prominent but under‑researched form of covert statecraft in which states outsource lethal operations to criminal groups to reduce political risk, preserve deniability, and obscure their direct involvement.
Despite growing evidence of collaboration between states and organised criminal actors, there is little integrated research that connects the fields of statecraft, assassination, and organised crime. Existing work in criminology, intelligence studies, and international relations touches on parts of the issue, but there is no unified framework that explains how and why states turn to criminal intermediaries.
This project addresses these gaps by bringing together academic scholarship and grey literature to examine the recruitment, financing, and operational arrangements that underpin state–criminal partnerships. It maps the strategies through which states increasingly rely on transnational criminal organisations to carry out targeted killings.
Using multidisciplinary literature review, comparative case studies and an analysis of primary and secondary sources, the project asks:
How and why states use organised crime networks to conduct assassinations.
How criminal actors are recruited, paid, and tasked.
What command-and-control structures look like within these covert relationships.
How states construct and maintain plausible deniability.
Which legal, diplomatic, and financial tools could help disrupt these networks.
PUBLICATIONS
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