Geopolitics, Statecraft and the Changing Face of Organised Crime

[Music] Hello and welcome to Rusey in London. I'm Kathy Henline, Director of Organised Crime and Policing here and this is Global Security Briefing, the podcast from Rusey's International Security Team that provides insights on security developments around the world. In this edition of Global Security Briefing, we're looking at the blurring of boundaries between crime, statecraft and geopolitics. The discussion accompanies a new special issue of our flagship Rusey journal on the changing face of organized crime. The issue brings together leading experts to examine how crime is evolving in a period of technological disruption, geopolitical competition and profound changes in the international order. The broad picture at the time of recording is one in which organized crime is no longer confined to the margins of international politics. From Russia to China and Iran, we know that states are outsourcing clandestine and covert tasks to organized criminal actors. In some cases, these relationships are based on tacit accommodation. In others, states actively cultivate criminal actors as proxies to undertake tasks that official institutions can't openly perform. Whether helping move sanctioned oil and other commodities, acquiring restricted technologies through front companies, facilitating cyber crime operations, supporting covert influence or sabotage activities, these networks can advance state objectives while providing authorities with plausible deniability. This is not just about drug trafficking or traditional organized crime. It's about criminal networks increasingly operating in spaces once associated primarily with intelligence services, foreign policy and national security. The problem is growing in significance. Available evidence suggests that criminal involvement in covert state linked activity has been expanding in recent years. The result is a fundamental shift in the global landscape with organized crime now acting as a structural force and a modality of power in contemporary geopolitics. These developments raise important questions for policing security and intelligence agencies. If criminal actors are increasingly being used to advance state interests, how we talk about organized crime may need to change more radically. In our special issue, we argue that policy has not kept pace with these shifts. At the national level, organized crime is often treated primarily as a law enforcement challenge, even as criminal networks become increasingly important to the way hostile states operate. Internationally, many of the frameworks we rely on were designed a quarter of a century ago in a very different geopolitical environment. We'll look at these issues today in a range of cases from Russia to Iran and the Western Balkans. The three core questions we will explore are first, how should we understand the relationship between organized crime and state power? Our criminal networks merely opportunistic actors operating in geopolitical spaces or are they increasingly performing strategic functions for states? Second, do these relationships look the same everywhere? Is the role played by criminal networks in Russia comparable to what we see in Iran or the Western Balkans or do different political environments produce different forms of state crime interaction? And third, if states such as Russia and Iran are increasingly using criminal networks to evade sections, acquire restricted goods or conduct covert operations, are existing laws, institutions and strategies equipped to respond. Joining us today to unpack all of this are two speakers. Heather Marquets is professor of development politics at the University of Birmingham. She's also director of the Sirius Organized Crime and Anti-Corruption Evidence or Socke's program. She's one of the leading scholars working on organized crime, corruption and governance and has spent many years examining how illicit networks become embedded in political and economic systems around the world. Magdalong is an international security researcher and consultants with over two decades of combined professional and academic experience. She holds a PhD in war studies from King's College London and is affiliated with security research institutes in the UK and the US. She specialises in covert action, hybrid threats and the growing intersection between organized criminal networks and state power in contemporary geopolitics. Welcome Heather, welcome Magdal. Thank you both for being with us today. Thank you very much, Kathy. It is great to be here with you and with Magdal today. Thank you very much for having me here. It's an absolute pleasure to be on this podcast. Before we discuss the current situation, let's look briefly at how we got here or at least part of it. We know the use of criminals by states is not a recent development and the mixing of state and non-state actors in covert operations has a long history. Heather, can you trace for us some of this background and tell us what you think has changed more recently? And ultimately, what is new about how states and criminals are collaborating today? My paper in the special issue was written with Matthew Redhead, a senior associate fellow at Rousey, who leads on a Sake's research project on state threats, which is much broader than the relationships we're talking about today. So in terms of that, our starting points in writing the paper on state and criminal actors are firstly Matthew's work, what he's called old wine new bottles, where he looks systematically at state threats, often also referred to as hybrid threats, sub-threshold warfare and other terms, to identify what's new, what isn't, and regardless what we should be paying much closer attention to. We brought this perspective together with my own research on stabilization, conflict in criminal and corrupt actors, within this to apply the same approach to state crime relationships now. Like Matthew and I have a shared belief in being as clear and precise as possible when it comes to terminology, which hopefully comes through in our analysis and in the paper. So when I talk about states and thinking about state threats, not just state actors or related actors, and define broadly as explicitly state-sponsored coercive threatening acts that fall short of war, but push the boundaries of international rules and norms to achieve a political effect. So a very strategic way to think about those relationships. As with state threats in general, there is much that we found that is new, but there's much that isn't. And just because everything is in new doesn't mean that we don't need to worry about it, of course, but it does mean we don't need to think and work as if we're inventing the wheel. You can go back pretty far in history to find examples of politicians hiring thugs, bandits, and gangs to attack opponents or to help keep populations under control. But more recently, there is a lot of evidence from the Second World War in Cold War to look at that fits our ideas of state threats. We know, for example, that the US Mafia worked with US authorities to monitor German and Italian infiltration of American ports throughout the Second World War, including through diaspora communities there. We also know that the US Mafia contributed to US government attempts to assassinate Cuba's leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, unsuccessful attempts, obviously. Working with criminals doesn't necessarily mean that you've got the quality results that you want to see. But anyone who's seen Godfather too wouldn't be surprised to hear any of this as well. We also know that US agencies tolerated or sanctioned using the terminology we've used in our paper, but tolerated narcotics trafficking by allies and by anti-communists, non-state groups in eastern Southeast Asia, and in Latin America during the Cold War. At the same time, the former Soviet Union did use criminals during the Cold War, but very much in an as-needed basis for activities like money laundering and smuggling that were more difficult for the state to undertake itself. The relationships didn't really become deeper until after the end of the Cold War, when Russia's relationship with capitalism and so-called private enterprise, whether legal or illegal, had changed by then. During this time, and in the past 20 years or so in particular, we've seen a growth in non-state criminal relationships in similar ways as well. So money laundering, smuggling, targeted violence, and so on, as well as non-state actors engaging illicit activities themselves for sources of revenue. Terminology like Knarca terrorism and Narca win search and see, for example, Krypton during the 2000s and the global war on terror to reflect this. We've also seen the same time period politicians using criminal actors for suppression of opponents and scaring populations, such as we saw in the horrific post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, 2008, for example, where politicians used criminal gangs to conduct violence that spiraled out of control and out of their control as well. We've also seen more and more politicians building personal relationships with criminal actors or criminal actors becoming politicians during this time period in effect cutting out the middleman. But these aren't really the same thing as the more strategic use of criminals by state actors in the way that we think about state threats, certainly as we've seen in the past and are seeing now. Get the US what's new? Well states have always tended to use criminal actors for capabilities that they can't easily source internally. They use them where access or state operatives might be more at risk and they use them for revenue generation as well, including beyond the reach of sanctions regimes. Criminals also choose to work with states for profit of course, but unlike with non-state actors they get other benefits with states. So they get protection for prosecution, they get access to state resources, they're able to have levered over elements of the states that tend to be more antagonistic to criminal actors including things like the judiciary, law enforcement and so on. It gives them advantages over competitors and much more. What's new? Well technology of course, that makes some things easier faster and cheaper and so on, but mostly its scale, it's the willingness of certain states to use criminal actors for state threats activities. It's the range of states now using criminals for similar purposes and also how fast it's all outpacing our own systems to address some of these challenges as well. Everything on the state criminal actor side might be moving very quickly. Our systems don't seem to be keeping up quite as well. Thanks Heather, that's really useful context and background. So let's focus on where we are now and what we know and what we don't know. There's still a lot I think that we don't understand about how states and criminal actors are working together. Why criminal actors are motivated to engage in these relationships and how widespread these links have become. We do have a growing body of cases from countries including Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. What do these cases tell us about the different forms state crime relationships can take and what do they look like in practice? Well, in our paper, we look across four areas and admittedly there is a little bit of overlap between them, but we look at criminals as covert operatives, criminals as professional service providers, crime as a weapon and crime as covert funding. There are lots of examples I could give, but just to pick out a few to illustrate. Iran for example has allegedly recruited a Hell's Angel leader to attack synagogue in Germany as well as a Kurdish criminal group for grenade attacks on Israeli embassies in Stockholm in Brussels in 2024. It's used criminals to surveil dissident media organizations overseas as well. China tends not to use criminal actors and covert operations in the same way. It has a huge amount of state capacity and capability and perhaps different intentions as well. Although we have seen many cases where Chinese criminals have been involved in unofficial police states in Europe, however, things like professional service providers and so on around money laundering and around cyber domain in particular is a huge area. Russia has used organized criminal groups for low level surveillance of the Baltics for arms trafficking to support a planned coup in Montenegro in 2016. More recently apparently to attack the UK Prime Minister's House to sabotage critical national infrastructure throughout Europe, including targets such as IKEA, sort of unusually, but where there's support for Ukraine and to try to undermine Ukraine recruiting criminals to hire bicycles for refugees to cross over the border into Scandinavian and Baltic neighbors in order to weaponize migration narratives and to destabilize as well and a really big recent case in December 2024. We found that the National Crime Agency and international partners helped to disrupt a huge Russian money laundering network through what they call Operation destabilize, which showed the very same infrastructure that supports drug traffickers, ransomware groups and so on. Also, it was providing the same services for Russian intelligence officers as well and where some of that funding seems to have ended up funding their covert operations too. Finally, with cyber, it's a huge area for state crime relationships, whether that is recruitment of direct actors, but also the technical capabilities and so on that states may or may not have. Russia has had cases where they've given immunity to hackers who agreed to work with the FSB in exchange for immunity from criminal charges or where criminals allow the state to use systems that they've penetrated. Many state hackers have conducted state-directed activities during the day, but also their own criminal activities at night, and with the state seeming to turn a blind eye as well. And North Korea has been particularly active when it comes to cryptocurrency theft and hacking and so on with this becoming a real specialist area for the North Korean state in terms of these relationships. Thanks Heather. Magda, turning to you now. We've talked about states using criminal actors for everything from sanctions evasion and elicit procurement to covert operations and influence activities, but there seems to be something bigger going on here than simply states outsourcing individual tasks. Magda, you've looked at this structural embeddedness of criminal actors in your work. Our criminal networks becoming more deeply woven into the way power is exercised internationally. And if so, how should we understand that shift? So Heather and Magda's work gives us a very useful way of thinking about different forms of the relationship between organized crime and state. So we look at operatives and service providers, crime as a weapon, crime as funding, etc. I would build on this by saying that the next question is not only why states and what states are outsourcing, but what kind of international system makes that outsourcing so easy and so useful. So that is where we look at infrastructure, finance, logistics and professional enablers who become central to these kind of links and connections. So elicit outsourcing captures part of the phenomenon that Heather had discussed, especially where states start criminals for specific operations. But the broad shift that I see in my research is that criminality is becoming embedded in infrastructure through which power is exercised. So essentially what I'm saying is that it's not always about outsourcing, right? Sometimes it's a symbiosis, sometimes it's about tolerance, sometimes it's about infrastructural dependence or even strategic exploitation of elicit systems already built into globalization. So organized crime has become entrenched within the very infrastructure, the very systems through which international order is sustained and contested, particularly under conditions that we see today, geopolitics, economic fragmentation, regulatory, symmetry and strategic competition. What I do want to highlight, however, is that the key point here is not that organized crime is replacing state power or that criminals have suddenly become geopolitically relevant. And as Heather pointed out, they've always been useful to states in variety of roles. Their shift is that criminal infrastructures are now embedded in systems that stays depend on. So as I mentioned, logistics, finance, procurement, cyber, migration, that's another big one, energy, coercion, sanction, evasion. So states are using criminal methods, criminal infrastructures and criminal intermediaries to take advantage that they offer specifically deniability, economic sanctions evasion for economy, coercion, disruption, influence and strategic ambiguity. So that in my mind makes organized crime less a peripheral pathology and more of a modality of power or modality through which power is exercised by these states. But what complicates things is that we also, when we look at how these organized crime networks are transnational criminal networks work, not just with states, but also among themselves, that these transnational criminal networks are TCNs. They exhibit features of something that a Spanish prosecutor referred to as uberization of crime, meaning it's a crime of the service business model. In other words, criminal networks don't all do the same thing, but they provide services to other criminal networks, but also to states. And then of course, many of us are familiar with the term polycriminality. This is where criminal actors diversify criminal activities across markets, whether to mitigate risk or maximize profit. And the term that recently became an evoke is geochrominality. This is where states use all average criminal networks to achieve foreign policy objectives. So for instance, if we are looking at recently dismantled Irish Bosnian, Chilean, Dutch, Moroccan, Italian, crime syndicate, so this is like one crime consortium that was recently dismantled and it was referred to as a super cartel in the world of organized crime. They created an investment fund essentially for their co-canships. So they essentially function as a business to lower detection and mitigate financial risk. And then on the other hand of it, you have for instance the Irish component of the Kinehank cartel, for instance, loaned its money through Russian money laundering networks. So they are cooperating, they're working together. So these organized crime networks are no longer just dispersed and diverse and just focusing Italian mafia works on this and Bosnia mafia works on that Moroccan on this. They're working together to enable operations, to make these operations more profitable, for instance, and to mitigate the risk. But the Bosnian partel for instance, the part I was of the super-curtale, they were part of what the Bosnian prosecutors refer to as a network that attempted to use up the state to quote unquote take over the state through political influence and institutional capture. So they got involved with law enforcement, political institutions, sports, using bribery, funding election campaigns, establishing shell companies, leveraging political instability in the region, that these, all of these things, essentially, are indicators of the environment in which criminal and state actors operate within overlapping spheres of influence. So we're no longer just talking about organized crime, as a particular sense of problem, but something that is more integrated in the system through which states operate in whether it's internationally or domestically, in some instances, as we've seen in Bosnia. And finally, one other point that I really want to stress here is that while the question of direct control and delegation of non-state actors broadly is a taxing one, we mustn't forget that criminal actors have agency and that their engagement with state can offer a range of practical benefits, some of which had already had already mentioned. So more importantly, these criminal actors are evolving alongside states in shared technological infrastructural environments. So these relationships are not just simply opportunistic alignments, but they've become patterns of calculators, strategic synergies. So states increasingly take advantage of this. They exploit these criminal networks, not necessarily through command and control, but through informal, deniable, and mutually opportunistic relationships. Thanks, Magda. And keen to talk now a bit more about enablers. If organized crime is becoming more deeply embedded in contemporary geopolitics, what makes that possible in terms of the financial systems, logistic networks, communications technologies, and commercial infrastructures it uses? Magda, I know you've looked at cases from Russia's shadow fleet and sanctions of Asian networks to Chinese money laundering ecosystems and criminal brokerage hubs in Spain and the Western Balkans. What do these cases tell us about the roles of infrastructure, like ports, shipping networks, shell companies, financial intermediaries, professional lablers, and logistics hubs? Are we focusing too much on criminal organizations and not enough on the infrastructure that enables them? I think that we're too focused on criminal organizations as discrete groups. The more important question is, what makes them operational useful? So a cartel, a mafia group, or Smuggler network becomes strategically valuable to a state when it has access to ports or shipping routes or shell companies. This is where criminality becomes an interest structure rather than just behavior. So the critical question is not whether state strategic objectives are becoming structurally dependent on illicit systems. And I think this is something that we need to focus on as we study the relationship with criminal organizations and states, because such dependence does not require formal command and control relationships. So in advanced economies, for instance, this dependence manifests through brokerage hubs, professional enablers, or regulatory arbitrage. This brings me to ports and shipping and shell companies, lawyers, brokers, who essentially become a connective tissue. So as I mentioned in the case of shadow fleet, for instance, illicit functionalities embedded in the manipulation of legitimate commercial and regulatory systems. So for instance, reflagging and name changing mid voyage is unusual, but it's not necessarily a violation of international law, because it contains loopholes under which this is permitted. Another one is, for instance, the example I give in my paper is cost of the soul. This is an advanced economy, but here the brokerage is not merely facilitative, but it constitutes the infrastructional function for transnational criminal systems. So the whole region is a host to specialize the ecosystem built around legal loopholes, high-end real estate, professional enablers, who become a buffer between criminal actors, illicit infrastructures, and regulatory systems. So essentially, cost of the soul and similar environments become structurally necessary to the functioning of complex transnational illicit markets. And also can be used for geopolitical ends, like, for instance, Russian intelligence agencies and criminal groups have been accused of leveraging Catalonia's independence crisis in exchange for future favorable regulatory treatment of cryptocurrency. Essentially, what we see here is that regional actors operate as intermediaries, linking producers, transporters, distributors across continents. Another example is Serbia, for instance, in Serbia and Montenegro, criminal figures working for SkyECC resale, encrypted platform, worked for the platform, but also simultaneously used that platform to plan killings and narcotic shipments. And dismantling of this platform pointed to the connections between policymakers, law enforcement, intelligence services, organized crime. So criminal networks are displaying highly adaptive capacity. And they continuously reassize their exposure and enforcement patterns and logistic vulnerabilities. So this shows, for instance, how commercial shipping infrastructure has been carpeted and into the operational backbone of transnational trafficking networks that the states can tap into. So let me bring you both in on a final question. If organized crime is becoming more deeply intertwined with strategic competition and state activity, what does that mean for the UK and its partners? Are we still approaching this primarily as a law enforcement problem when it should be viewed as a strategic security challenge? And if so, what would a more effective response look like? Heather, I'll come to you first, feel thoughts on this. - Thank you very much, Kathy. I wanted to come to a couple of things that Magda said, criminals and state threats actors don't work in silos and yet our responses are highly siloed. As Magda pointed out, both groups are rapidly learning and adapting. And this seems to be both things that UK and other Western state systems seem to really struggle with. Criminal actors and the states that work with them have higher R&D budgets, research and development budgets, so to speak, they're less constrained by ethical reviews and by laws and their risk appetite also tends to be higher. It's absolutely critical that we move out of our silos and work together in a more integrated way, something that is often said but has proven really difficult to do, that's particularly the case where the direct threat to the UK isn't always clear. Magda made some really important points around international systems. And again, going back to what we saw with non-state actors and criminal actors during the global war and terror, it applies now as well. Taliban, Hezbollah and others didn't just earn money through criminal activity and they didn't just deal in cash. They earned revenue from legal sources and investments just like the Italian and US mafia's and others always have. And they laundered both legal and illegal revenues through the same formal systems of global finance and professional enablers, that legal companies that individuals use to reduce their tax burden or hide assets for a range of purposes. So if we're going to do something about these relationships between states and criminal actors, we need to connect with existing efforts out there in order to tackle illicit finance and to bring about changes within those formal systems and those enablers as well. Our own politics tends to shape what we see as the problems as well as the approaches available to us. And sectors do have their own politics. This Cathy does very well through her current Sockhase or Search project on ports and beyond. There's more innovation, integration, and risk appetite in the cyber domain, for example. So this includes things like increased investment and dealing with existing vulnerabilities and building resilience, working across a public sector, a private sector, and with the public in ways that we just don't see say in the narcotics smuggling domain. We could be approaching narcotics in the same way, bringing together public health, charities, education, private sector, international and national government organizations along with law enforcement. But this seems to be beyond the capability of politicians and public's decountenance. It's much easier to make claims about Chinese money laundering organizations and fentanyl than it is to prove that or to actually deal with the underlying problems leading to the fentanyl crisis in the US or elsewhere. That's why within the paper, Matthew, and I talk about moving beyond a kind of state actor first approach or criminal actor first and trying to move beyond the silos. And we offer in the paper a state actor domain matrix where we look at relationship types, criminal functions, and dominant patterns to try to illustrate how, if you're looking at Russia, well, the way in which Russia uses criminals within the cyberspace, physical violence, illicit finance, narcotics, and smuggling, and migration and people looks different across all of those different things. It might look similar in some to the way that China and Iran operate, for example, it might look different. And if we're thinking about working across sectors, we have the challenge of actually bringing together different sectors within any particular government, but also within that to break down the way in which we see that. So there isn't necessarily one way to approach Russia as a state actor. It's with criminals. And the same way that there isn't one way we should be thinking about a list at finance or cyber or so on. And this comes back to some of those lessons that we saw from stabilization, where we need to think about the way in which the context specificity shapes the way the threat actually looks. And the approaches that we have available to us and where some of the things that we might try to do might be easier or might be more difficult in some areas than others. Magda, I'm keen for your perspective on the same question. What these developments mean for the UK and its partners and what a more effective response might look like. Thank you. I actually agree with what Heather outlined. I think broadly speaking for the UK and its partners, the implication is that organized crime is not just something that happens inside a society, right? Domestically, it's increasingly something that hostile actors can use against society. So hostile state activity and organized crime should not be treated as separate files. I'm not saying that they're not in certain instances, but they increasingly become an intertwined. So the implication is that we cannot just treat it as a domestic security or policing problem. It's part of the infrastructure through which adversaries can contest the UK or allies interests below the threshold of war. So I think the first implication is that the UK and its partners need to stop treating organized crime and hostile state activity as separate problems. And of course, this is not to say that a lot of organized crime is not about profit, markets and local violence, but they can also fulfill all the other things that we've discussed. So far, moving money, evading sanctions, procuring restricted goods, right? Intimidating dissidents, providing logistical access, save houses, creating deniable disruptions. So they play all these roles that are relevant to both domestic security but also geopolitics. So we should stop referring to the fact that the states are using criminals in a episodic way. It's more about the criminals that become part of the operating environment in the strategic competition. And that matters because it essentially gives hostile actors reach, gives them deniability and resilience. And as far as what could we do to mitigate a threat posed by such relationships and actors, I think we need to focus less narrowly on individual criminal groups and more on the infrastructure that makes them strategically useful. These criminal actors become strategically useful to states if they have access to ports to shipping networks, to shell companies, professional enablers, financial intermediaries, crypto services. And of course, we mustn't forget the role that corruption and corrupt officials and logistics hubs play in this respect. So while law enforcement remains essential, it has to be integrated with intelligence, with sanctions, export controls, financial regulations, diplomatic pressure. So in practical terms, what does this mean? Well, it means that we should not be asking what crime is being committed. It's what strategic function is this particular network performing, who benefits from it. What infrastructure allows it to keep operating? I think this is a shift that we still need. So we recognize there's the problem, but we're not necessarily very good at applying the solution, whatever that solution may be. It's never easy, right? There are so many moving pieces. It's not just about the solution from a particular agency, it's not just about law enforcing, it's just about foreign policy, it's not about intelligence. It could also be about bureaucratic rivalries. So we've seen that certainly in the US, we see a lot of bureaucratic rivalries, and I think we need to do a better job of bringing these together. And I think that the UK government has recognized, like the 2025 National Security Strategy, for instance, places serious organized crime along with terrorism, extremism, cyber and state threats. So it does recognize that there is a problem that serious organized crime is a major threat to national security, but our responses compartmentalized. And we still need to bring all of these resources that we have from organized crime box to safe threat box to sanctions evasion box and economic security box and kind of bring it all together to enable better approach and better response. Okay, I think coming on that point, that point about gene operational responses, they're important, but they're not sufficient. You end up with a situation like we saw in the past of playing whack-a-mole. So unless you actually deal with the underlying problems, then you end up repeatedly trying to disrupt and then things get displaced and so on. In the paper with Matthew, we talk about the interoperability challenge and how this is something that cuts across all these different functions that governments have in ways that are particularly challenging. And one concrete thing that we suggest is perhaps creating a dedicated state-actor crime-seller working group to try to bring together representation from different parts of government and agencies in order to deal with this challenge and to think about sharing data, building common understanding, or so on. I really struck me this weekend when I was thinking about this, that the stabilization unit was an effort here in the UK to try to manage that interoperability challenge. And it brought together the MOD, the Ministry of Defense, the Foreign Office, and the Department for International Development in one group that sat together and had a particular structure and reporting and co-working and so on. Where it became more challenging and different paper working on right now, somebody else on this is actually integrating that with the Home Office and National Crime Agency with the crime side. And that is, I think, largely the result of the direct threat imperative. So when it comes to national level departments, the focus is on the direct threat to the UK in this instance as opposed to what could be a strategic or security threat or an indirect threat overseas. The other departments, Ministry of Defense, Foreign Office, and Department for International Diffit, most of their activity was overseas and so they were shared ways of working or so on. And that sense, in order for us to think about state threats and criminal actors together differently, as we say in the paper, as a law enforcement problem, foreign policy problem, military problem, financial intelligence problem, and a humanitarian problem as well, you have to be able to bridge that national and international focus departments that direct threat versus the strategic threat in ways that the system hasn't been able to do so before, but we really do need to be able to do that in order to address these relationships much more effectively beyond operational responses. Thanks, you both. I think this has been a fascinating discussion of how criminal networks are being woven into the fabric of international competition. We've talked about how their helping states project influence, sustained strategic objectives, and bypass traditional diplomatic and military constraints. So the question facing all of us moving forward is how best we can respond across sectors. This brings us to the end of today's discussion on organized crime, statecraft and geopolitics. I'd like to thank this week's guests, Heather Marquette and Magdalong. Global Security briefing is available on all major podcast platforms. Please like and subscribe. The further information about the work of the organized crime and policing team, please follow us on LinkedIn @organizedcrime and policing @ruci and also find out more about the team's work and that of the international security team on theruci website. For now, it's goodbye from me, Kathy Henline at Recie in London.