Since the enactment of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which directly criminalized human trafficking, research on human trafficking has significantly increased. While recent studies have analyzed trafficking legislation, characteristics of offenders and victims, and types of human trafficking rings, little data has been collected on human trafficking ties to organized crime. The...

Organized and transnational organized crime has become a prominent political issue in Canada, as elsewhere. The topic is understudied in Canadian political science, in part because of the inherent difficulties of research. The paper begins a reflection on the politics of organized and transnational organized crime in Canada. How has the Canadian government responded to the threat of organized a...

Although the government has made strides in the fight against traditional organized crime, new nontraditional organized crime groups have emerged alongside enduring forms of racketeering such as bribery and extortion. The field of organized crime groups has expanded to include new nontraditional, transnational groups from Asia and Eastern Europe among others, in addition to traditional groups l...

JEL Classification: K42, L13, O17.

Organized crime emerges out of the power vaccuum that is created by the absence of state enforcement, and which can have many sources: geographic, social, and ethnic distance, prohibition, or simply collapse of state institutions. Mafias and gangs are hierarchically organized and can be thought of as providing primitive state functions, with economic costs that are typically much higher than th...