Summary of the proposed special issue: Organizedcrime is a pressing concern for national and international policymakers and practitioners, especially in non-Western contexts where it poses a major threat but remains under-researched. The geographies of organized crime offer a promising avenue for improving our understanding and informing more effective and ethical responses. Despite many pockets of promising work, a lack of coherence is a barrier to advancing a broader research agenda. This special issue aims to bring together cutting-edge empirical research on the new geographies of organized crime to advance thinking on its different spatial dimensions and inspire more nuanced, rigorous, and innovative research and responses. Our inclusive approach to conceptualizing geography considers physical and virtual spaces, and their linkages, at different scales of analysis (micro, meso, macro). Our perspective on conceptualizing organized crime is similarly broad, acknowledging that a wide range of empirical phenomena fall within its scope. The unifying thread of the special issue will be the spatial embeddedness of organized crime (what, how, when, why, who, and, crucially, where?). Weare particularly interested in submissions related to the following areas, as they apply to the geographies of organized crime:
- new sources of data (e.g., open-sourcedatasets) and innovative uses of more traditional datasets;
- innovative applications of well-established methods (e.g., ethnography, survey research) and promising approaches that are newer to this field or to the field in general (e.g., riskterrain modeling, social network analysis, crime script analysis, natural experiments, spatial epidemiology, agent-based modeling);
- under-researched actors, networks, markets, and countries (e.g., environmental crime, counterfeit goods and medicines, the interplay between physical and virtual spaces)
- conceptual, ethical, and practical challenges for analysis and intervention; and
- the development of innovative theories.