Is drawing from the state ‘state of the art’?: a review of organised crime research data collection and analysis, 2004–2018

This paper presents a systematic review of organised crime data collection and analysis methods. It did this by reviewing all papers published in Trends in Organized Crime and Global Crime between 2004 and 2018 (N = 463). The review identified a number of key weaknesses. First, organised crime research is dominated by secondary data analysis of open-access documents, and documents are seldom subjected to the same principles guiding primary data collection methods. Second, data analysis lacked balance with a distinct lack of inferential statistical analysis. Third, there was a significant absence of victim or offender voices with an overreliance on data from state bodies and the media. The paper concludes that organised crime, as field of research, appears unbalanced by reliance upon a small number of methods and sources. Rebalancing the field requires more organised crime researchers to speak to offenders and victims, employ greater use of statistical analysis and tighten our methodologies

Assessing the Nature and Role of Terrorism Risk Models in the Insurance Sector

Insurance represents an important but often overlooked component to managing and mitigating the impact of terrorism. It plays a key role in enhancing resilience to terrorism especially regarding high intensity terrorist campaigns or high impact terrorist attacks. Extremely little attention however has focused on how the insurance industry assesses and calculates terrorism risk and what the implications may be of this. This research article provides for the first time an overview of the three main terrorism risk-modelling platforms that are used in the insurance market today: Touchstone, RMS Probabilistic Terrorism Mode (PTM), and Sunstone. The article assesses the different approaches to threat and loss calculation that each of the models take. The analysis reveals that while the three models all approach the projection of terrorism loss in a broadly similar manner, there are variations in focus, which results in a significant difference in terrorism outlook and projected loss. The discussion concludes by considering some of the implications of these variations as well as potential avenues forward

Re-Offending by released Terrorist Prisoners:Separating Hype from Reality

Recent cases of attacks by released terrorist prisoners highlight issues around the risk of re-offending posed by former terrorist prisoners. What are the appropriate processes and systems for managing and risk assessing such individuals, and to what extent is rehabilitation possible in the context of terrorist offending? This Policy Brief will explore these and related issues to help inform wider discussion and debates on appropriate policy in this area. In this Policy Brief, the authors critically analyse the definition of ‘recidivism’, and demonstrate the need for a concrete operational definition before one is able to truly analyse recidivist activity. Following this, the authors discuss terrorist recidivism in a range of international contexts, ranging from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, the United States to Israel. By taking this broader perspective it allows the reader to gain a greater understanding of what factors related to recidivism rates may be context-specific, and which are universal

COVID-19 and terrorism: Assessing the short-and long-term impacts

The COVID-19 pandemic is already having a significant impact on terrorism in a variety of ways. There is a mixed picture on the level of attacks in the short-term – lockdown measures will tend to inhibit attacks but terrorist propaganda calling for attacks (while authorities are distracted, etc.) will incite some incidents. Much propaganda – and particularly that connected to far-right extremism – is focusing on conspiracy theories connected to COVID-19 and this has already inspired plots and attacks. Islamist extremist propaganda is focusing more on the vulnerability of government opponents distracted by the pandemic and the opportunity this presents for attacks. There is a significant current increase in online extremist activity, raising the risk of increasing short-to-medium term radicalisation. There are strong long-term concerns that states weakened by the serious economic consequences of the pandemic will be more vulnerable to the emergence/resurgence of terrorist groups in many parts of the world