A framework for characterising the nature of organised crime groups, developed by Paolo Campana, Professor of Criminology and Director of the Violence Research Centre, and his long-term collaborator Federico Varese, has been widely referenced by the 2025 World Drug Report, from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
The annual report seeks to provide a global reference on drug markets, trends and policy developments, collating the latest research and analysis into key findings and implications for future policy.
In this year’s themed volume ‘Contemporary issues on drugs’, the chapter titled “Drug trafficking and organised crime” draws from research by Paolo Campana and his collaborator Federico Varese to characterise groups involved in drug trafficking and outline implications for policy makers.
Paolo Campana’s joint work with Federico Varese developed an analytical distinction between governance-related and trade-related activities in the analysis of organised crime. As also highlighted in the UNODC report, the orientation towards trade- or governance-oriented activities influences a group's structure, modus operandi, and behaviour.
‘Organized crime groups that engage in drug trafficking differ greatly in terms of their structure, make-up and goals, with groups generally appearing to be oriented towards trade or towards governance. Those oriented towards trade are generally more agile and prioritize market transactions and profit maximization, whereas those oriented towards governance are found to be more hierarchical and seek to control territories, or the markets and people within them.’ (2025 World Drug Report)
Understanding the orientation of an organised crime group is therefore essential for identifying the interventions and law enforcement operations that are most likely to succeed, as well as for assessing the group's threat to individuals, communities and state authority.
“Separating governance from trading activities is essential to understanding how organised crime operates in highly lucrative drug markets — and in illegal markets more broadly," says Campana. "Criminal governance is not the exclusive domain of mafia-type organisations: depending on the setting, some cartels, maras, urban gangs and local organised crime groups can all perform governance functions."
Read the research paper in which Campana and Varese introduce a novel measure for the strength of governance-oriented organised crime groups in the UK and find out more about Campana’s work applying network analysis to model criminal phenomena, from the internal dynamics of organised crime groups to the workings of illegal markets and violence.
Find out more:
Organized Crime in the United Kingdom: Illegal Governance of Markets and Communities,The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 58, Issue 6, November 2018, Pages 1381–1400, Paolo Campana, Federico Varese
Criminal governance in a large European city: the case of gangs in London. European Journal of Criminology, online first, Paolo Campana, Federico Varese and Cecilia Meneghini