Introduction

Abstract

This book collates a number of papers that were presented in Amsterdam during the seminars of the Centre for Information and Research on Organized Crime (CIROC) in 2002 and 2003. The central question of these seminars was whether and how organized crime has evolved in the last years, as a part of the larger social phenomena of globalisation, migration and the developments in technology, and as a result of concrete and far-reaching events such as the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the war in Iraq. This book highlights the multifaceted nature of organized crime and serves as an illustration of the variety of scientific perspectives and methods that are used to describe and interpret this phenomenon. It is common knowledge that scientific research into criminality is hampered and perhaps even threatened by the complexity of its subject matter. Scientists trying to describe the scale of crime are faced with the problems of 'the dark number ', the unreliability of police statistics and victim memory gaps. Studies of the true motives of perpetrators are hindered by the general difficulties in obtaining reliable data from the perpetrators themselves, as well as by the fact that the records of formal control agencies are often only reconstructions of the motives. These methodological problems apply a fortiori to the study of organized crime. The contributions to this book exemplify different attempts to tackle the slippery subject of organized crime in a scientifically reliable way.