Addressing police and military involvement in serious and organised crime
Project Live
PROJECT TEAM
Dr Liam O’Shea
Royal United Services Institute / SGI Research
Contact: liam.oshea@sgiresearch.com
Dr Liam O’Shea is a specialist in security sector reform, anti-corruption, and the politics and security of Eurasia. His research focuses on how political and institutional dynamics shape the integrity of security institutions and he has also led major studies on organised crime, illicit economies and governance reform, including projects for the Royal United Services Institute, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, and Transparency International. A former adviser with the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, he now directs SGI Research, providing analysis and policy advice on governance and security challenges in complex political environments.
Dr Louis Alexandre Berg
Georgia State University
Contact: lberg@gsu.edu
Louis-Alexandre Berg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sciences Po Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) and at the Universite de Lille Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Administratives, Politiques et Sociale (CERAPS). His research examines the causes and consequences of violent conflict and transnational crime, focusing on the role of armed forces in politics, as well as the effects of international security assistance, and the politics of security and justice sector reform. He is the author of Governing Security After War: The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector (Oxford University Press, 2022), which examines international efforts to restructure police and military forces after civil war. He has also published research on the politics of policing and organized crime in Latin America. His research has appeared in several journals including in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, Security Studies, Civil Wars, International Interactions, and International Peacekeeping. He has been a research fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Harvard Kennedy School and has served as an expert adviser for the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the United Nations. He has conducted fieldwork in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Honduras, Haiti, and Colombia. Dr. Berg holds a PhD in Government from Georgetown University, a Masters in International Affairs from Princeton University, and a BA from Brown University. He is fluent in French and Spanish.
Dr Lucía Tiscornia
University College Dublin
Contact: lucia.tiscornia@ucd.ie
Dr. Lucía Tiscornia is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at University College Dublin, and a Research Affiliate with the Transitional Justice and Violence Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Her work explores the conditions under which police reform contributes to (or hinders) the respect of human rights in new democracies. She also conducts research on the determinants of organised criminal behaviour. Within this line of research, she focuses on the role of the security apparatus in increasing or decreasing violent criminal responses, as well as other criminal behaviour such as market capture. Her work has been published in International Organization, the Journal of Peace Research, Political Research Quarterly, and Sociological Methods & Research, among others. She is the recipient of an European Research Council Starting Grant (1.5 million euro), to study the dynamics of criminal governance in less explored settings in Latin America.
Dr Alexander Kupatadze
King’s College London
Contact: Alexander.kupatadze@kcl.ac.uk
Dr Alexander Kupatadze is Associate Professor at King’s College London. Prior to joining King’s College Dr Kupatadze taught at the School of International Relations, St Andrews University. He held the postdoctoral positions at George Washington University (2010-11), Oxford University (2012-13) and Princeton University (2013-14). His research specialisation is organised crime, corruption, public sector reform, informal politics and crime-terror nexus. His regional expertise is post-Soviet Eurasia. His work has appeared in Journal of Democracy, Theoretical Criminology, Nonproliferation Review, British Journal of Political Science and other leading journals. His research has been funded by European Union, British Academy and Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Security, stability and development all require clean, efficient and effective police and militaries. But in many countries security sector organisations are heavily involved in serious and organised crime and widespread corruption and abuse. There is also very little evidence on what types of initiatives and reforms are effective at addressing such problems. In particular, insufficient attention has been given to dynamics which affect political elites’ ability and interest in supporting reform.
This project focuses primarily on what drives political elites to curtail political and security actors’ involvement in serious and organised crime, since an effective state response to serious and organised crime is not possible without this. Too often, evidence on ‘what works’ is limited to synthesis of evaluations of short-term donor programmes. Our approach takes a broader look to identify what sets of reforms are most effective at countering state security actors’ involvement in serious and organised crime and what makes political elites decide to initiate reform. The project consolidates findings from research on anti-corruption, on organised crime in Western states, and political settlements and is based on deep case study analysis of what drove relatively successful reforms in Colombia, Georgia and South Africa.
PUBLICATIONS
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Briefing note and research papers - Addressing police and military involvement in serious and organised crime (coming soon)
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