The International Institute for Security Studies (IISS) and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime welcomed to a discussion on transnational threats on 5th of April at IISS in London.

WITH
Michael Miklaucic
Director of Research, Information and Publications, Center for Complex Operations, US National Defense University

Mark Shaw
Director, Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime

Tuesday Reitano
Deputy Director, Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime

Hilary Matfess
Research Analyst and Senior Programme Officer, Center For Democracy and Development, Abuja

It was an opportunity to explore some of the findings of a recent US National Defense University project on the emergence, over the past ten years, of a ‘highly adaptive and parasitic’ criminal ecosystem. The panellists explored its consequences for national security, state fragility and the global order.

Specifically, the discussion addressed the following questions: what is the role of social media in bolstering the appeal of anti-state actors, allowing them to establish ‘cult-like’ followings? To what extent are jihadist networks increasingly a part of the drug-smuggling business in West African ‘protection economies’? How is the growing grey space between licit and illicit commerce explored by global counterfeit and smuggling networks? And how have technological innovations, which have made our lives and work so much easier, produced disconcerting vulnerabilities in the cyber domain that are increasingly being exploited by criminal groups, terrorists and hostile states alike?

Michael Miklaucic is the Director of Research, Information and Publications at the Center for Complex Operations (CCO), National Defense University. He is also the Editor of PRISM, the journal of CCO. Prior to this assignment he served in various positions at USAID and the Department of State, including Chief Operating Officer for the USAID Office of Democracy and Governance, and Rule of Law Specialist in the Center for Democracy and Governance. From 2002–03 he served as the Department of State Deputy for War Crimes Issues.

Mark Shaw is Director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the LSE Ideas International Drug Policy Project. He was previously the National Research Foundation Professor of Justice and Security at the University of Cape Town, Department of Criminology. Prior to joining UCT, Mark was a director at a boutique consulting firm specialising in fragile states and transnational threats. Mark worked for ten years at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, following a number of governmental and civil society roles in South Africa.

Tuesday Reitano is Deputy Director at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime and a senior research advisor at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, where she leads five organised crime observatories in Africa. Tuesday was formerly the director of CT MORSE, an independent policy and monitoring unit for the EU’s counter-terrorism programmes, and for 12 years was a policy specialist in the UN System, including with the UN Development Programme, the UN Development Group and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Raj Samani is the EMEA Chief Technical Officer for Intel Security, having previously worked as the Chief Information Security Officer for a large UK public sector organisation. He was inducted into the Infosecurity Europe Hall of Fame (2012), won the Virus Bulletin Péter Ször Award for the paper/investigation he co-authored on the takedown of the Beebone Botnet, and was named in the UK’s top 50 data leaders and influencers by Information Age. Raj is currently the Cloud Security Alliance’s Chief Innovation Officer and previously served as Vice President for Communications in the ISSA UK Chapter. He is also Special Advisor for the European Cybercrime Centre.

Karl Lallerstedt leads the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime programme on Illicit Trade, Financial and Economic Crime. He is particularly interested in the illicit trade in products that replace those that are generally licit. Karl is also the co-founder of Black Market Watch and member of the OECD Task Force on Charting Illicit Trade. Formerly, Karl was the anti-illicit trade strategy director at a leading multinational corporation, steering committee member of the International Chamber of Commerce’s Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy, and a political and economic analyst for the Department of State, Oxford Analytica and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Hilary Matfess is a Research Analyst and Senior Programme Officer at the Center For Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria. She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies at the National Defense University, a freelance journalist, and a contributor to the Nigeria Social Violence Project at the John Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. She works on issues of security and governance in sub-Saharan Africa. Her book on gender and Boko Haram is forthcoming with Zed Books.