To point out the vagueness surrounding the concept of organised crime is nothing new. The paradoxes and imprecision of the concept have been shown repeatedly (Paoli, 2002; Levi, 1998; Brodeur, 1998, 2002; Ruggiero, 1996, 2002; Queloz, 1999; Naylor, 1997, 2002). Criticism has come from a number of disciplines. The lack of a juridical definition, for example, has irritated penalists for years.1 The unrealistic statistics have been contradicted by the work of economists (Cartier-Bresson, 2002; Cartier-Bresson et al., 2001; Kopp, 2001a, 2001b), whereas fantasising about global crime syndicates endangering the power of states has been exposed by specialists in international relations (Friman, 2002; Friman and Andreas, 1999) to the point where one wonders whether the concept should not be dropped altogether (Favarel-Garrigues, 2001, 2002).
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Godefroy, T. (2004). The Control of Organised Crime in France: A Fuzzy Concept but a Handy Reference. In: Fijnaut, C., Paoli, L. (eds) Organised Crime in Europe. Studies Of Organized Crime, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2765-9_27
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