Criminal Entanglements (CRIMTANG)
Linked to terrorism, moral breakdown and societal decay, transnational organized crime (TOC) has come to embody current global anxieties as a figure of fear and cause of disquiet.
THE PROJECT IS COMPLETED
The Criminal Entanglements project (CRIMTANG) researched transnational crime and policing via an ethnographic and multi-sited research design. It followed human flows and formations of TOC and explored the illegal and overlapping flows of migrants and drugs from North-West Africa into Europe.
The project looked at smuggling routes and trafficking trajectories stretching from West Africa, to North Africa and Europe. By conducting collective fieldwork at different points along this trafficking route, it granted us insight into specific nodes within the illegal and illicit trade in question, as well as it developed new theoretical and methodological apparatuses for apprehending TOC that can be exported and applied to other regions and contexts.
Linked to terrorism, moral breakdown and societal decay, transnational organized crime (TOC) had come to embody previous global anxieties as a figure of fear and cause of disquiet. The smuggling of people and drugs were among the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world, yet despite its central position on the social and political radar, our knowledge of TOC remained limited, and its underlying socio-cultural logics and practices remained under-researched.
In order to shed new light on TOC, the CRIMTANG project worked through an inter-disciplinary and mixed-methods approach to global criminology.
CRIMTANG comprised a cross-disciplinary research team of anthropologists, criminologists, economists and political scientists, and build on prior research experience of the people, regions and languages under study. The project gathered together some of the world’s leading scholars and institutions and connected international scholars within the field to the European research environment on ethnography, global criminology and TOC.
The project was anchored at the University of Copenhagen, but build on cooperation between the University of Copenhagen, the EHESS in Paris, the University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, Oxford University, and the University of Moulay Ismaïl in Meknes.
The foundational ethical code of non-maleficence required the team to shape its methods and ethical practices in a way that protected the already vulnerable subjects they were working with. All of the project’s activities followed the Code of Ethics drawn up by the AAA, and the project adhered to the EU and national guidelines for ethics in humanistic and social scientific research.
Funded by:
Criminal Entanglements (CRIMTANG) is funded by the European Research Council as a Consolidator Grant of 1,999,909 €.
Project: Criminal Entanglements (CRIMTANG)
Period: From 2018 until 2024