ABSTRACT
Organized crime has the capacity to significantly and negatively impact how ordinary people, businesses and institutions conduct their lives and do their work. The transnational nature of organized crime means that even while individual states may have considerable national capacity to respond, organized crime remains a problem that they cannot solve without multilateral cooperation. This chapter provides an overview of how and why the responses to TOC have evolved to this point, bringing together for the first time the interlocking elements of policy, enforcement, regulation and development interventions to counter organized crime in one coherent narrative. Since 1971, when Richard Nixon notoriously declared a “war on drugs” and in doing so dramatically increased the size and presence of US federal drug control agencies, the dominant form of response to transnational crime has been enforcement.
