Building resilience to organised crime: a policy review

This study highlights key elements of differing communities’ resilience to threats from armed conflict and illicit economies.

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State-centric approaches to building resilience to organised crime must be complemented with community- based, context-specific responses that challenge organised crime and violence at a local level. Local communities are key elements of the necessary response to the destabilising impacts of organised crime in conflict as well as post-conflict settings. There remains a gap in stakeholder understanding of the elements of community resilience to organised crime, particularly in unstable settings. This policy brief takes steps to address this gap, by analysing key drivers of community resilience – identified as social capital, community capacity, the role of women, economic capital and infrastructure – in four communities in Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso.

This policy brief is based on a research report, Building resilience to organised crime.

About the authors

Yvon Dandurand: Yvon is Professor Emeritus, Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of the Fraser Valley, B.C., Canada; fellow and senior associate, International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy; and a member of the Global Initiative Network of Experts.

Lucia Bird Ruiz Benitez de Lugo: Lucia is the Director of the Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Previously, she worked as legal and policy adviser to the Planning and Development Department of the Punjab government, Pakistan, and to the Ministry of Finance, Ghana.

Kingsley Madueke: Kingsley is the Nigeria research coordinator with the West Africa Observatory at the GI-TOC. He is a lecturer at the Centre for Conflict Management & Peace Studies at the University of Jos and has written extensively on violence and instability in Nigeria. He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Amsterdam.

Oumar Zombre: Oumar is a senior bilingual journalist, currently based in Burkina Faso. He has been practising for over fifteen years and has won a number of prizes and journalistic distinctions.

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