ABSTRACT
The intellectual foundation of the crime–terror nexus emerged from several strands of scholarship that questioned how mainstream academics of security perceived threats at times when national and/or international security environments had gone through considerable change. Within the context of the connection between crime and terrorism, Makarenko’s studies of the nexus have evolved from providing a basic linear model categorizing different forms of the nexus to illustrating a relationship that exists on a series of planes: one operational, one evolutionary and one conceptual. Alliances are the first type of relationship that exists between Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) and terrorism. Appropriation of tactics is the second type of relationship that case studies confirm exist between TOC and terrorism. Transformation occurs when ‘the ultimate aims and motivations of the organisation have actually changed. In these cases, the groups no longer retain the defining points that had hitherto made them a political or criminal group’.
