Summary of the proposed special issue: Organised crime is a pressing concern for national and international policy- makers and practitioners, especially in non-Western settings where it is a major threat but is under-researched. The geographies of organised crime are a promising area for improving understanding and informing more effective and ethical responses. Despite many pockets of promising work, lack of coherence is a barrier to advancing a broader research agenda. This special issue aims to convene cutting-edge empirical research on the new geographies of organised crime to advance thinking on its different spatial dimensions and inspire more nuanced, rigorous, and innovative research and responses. Our inclusive approach to conceptualising geography considers physical and virtual spaces, and their linkages, at different scales of analysis (micro, meso, macro). Our perspective on conceptualising organised 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 organised crime (what, how, when, why, who and, crucially, where?). We are particularly interested in submissions related to the following areas, as they apply to the geographies of organised crime:
- novel sources of data (e.g. open-source datasets), and innovative uses of more traditional datasets;
- innovative applications of more established methods (e.g. ethnography, survey-research) and promising approaches that are newer to this domain, or in general (e.g. risk terrain modelling, social network analysis, crime script analysis,natural experiments, spatial epidemiology, agent based modelling);
- under-researched actors, networks, markets and countries (e.g. environmental crime, counterfeit goods/medicine,the interplay between physical and virtual spaces)
- conceptual, ethical and practical challenges for analysis and intervention; and
- innovative theory development.