Crime-Terror Alliances and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security

This book examines the transborder connections between militant and criminal networks and the relationship between these and the states in which they operate. Trans-border ethnonational and religious identity groups provide settings for the establishment of trans-border hybrid militant and criminal networks that can pose grave threats to domestic and international security in Europe and elsewhere. Identity networks provide the basis for militant organizations using violent strategies “ insurgency and terrorism “ for political objectives. To gain funds and weapons, militant networks may establish criminal enterprises; or align with existing trans-border criminal networks. These hybrid trans-border networks, which we call Sunholy alliances, command economic and political resources; and suborn officials wherever their communal networks extend. This book focuses on three actors, examined at state and trans-national levels. The actors include group-based movements and organizations; however, the analysis is mostly concerned with trans-border networks based on them. Networks can also be interest-based, that is, concerned mainly with material gain rather than collective interests of an identity group. The key question is how and why the movements we call Sunholy alliances have jointly pursued political and economic gain and with what consequences for them and the states across which they operate. Six case studies are featured in this book: four from the Balkans, in the aftermath of the breakup of the Yugoslav Federation, and two from Islamic states whose militants “ Kurdish nationalists of the PKK and Algerian Islamists “ have carried out terror campaigns and criminal activities domestically and in Western Europe. This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism, insurgency, transnational crime, war and conflict studies, and IR in general.