Last Updated on September 25, 2026 by Karl Thompson
OMisha Glenny’s McMafia is the study A-level sociology uses to explain how organised crime went global. This post covers:
- What Glenny found, and his estimate of the size of the global criminal economy
- The conditions in which organised criminal networks thrive
- Bulgaria as the worked example
- Hobbs and Dunnighan’s glocal alternative, which is the main evaluation of Glenny
- What all this is worth in the exam
This material belongs to the globalisation and crime section of the crime and deviance module, on Paper 3 (7192/3).
Misha Glenny and McMafia
Misha Glenny (2008), McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld is a piece of investigative journalism rather than an academic study, and that is worth saying up front — it is based on several years of interviews with criminals, police officers and victims across dozens of countries rather than on a systematic research design.
Glenny’s central argument is that the collapse of Communism at the end of the 1980s, combined with the deregulation of global markets, created the conditions for organised crime to operate internationally on a scale it never had before. Criminal networks did what legitimate businesses did in the same period: they went global.
Glenny estimates that this global criminal economy accounts for around 15% of global GDP.
Treat that figure carefully, and say so in an exam — I have marked a great many scripts that quoted it as though it came off a government spreadsheet. It is Glenny’s own estimate of an economy that is deliberately hidden, not an official statistic, and he gives it slightly differently in different places — his publisher’s summary puts it at nearly a fifth. The honest way to use it is as an order of magnitude: the global criminal economy is very large, and nobody can measure it precisely. A student who says that has made an evaluation point; a student who states “15%” as a fact has not.
What these networks trade in
In rough order of economic importance:
- Drugs — the largest single component
- Money laundering — estimated at 2–5% of global GDP
- Human trafficking — around 4–5 million people a year, generating profits estimated at up to US$9.5 billion
- Weapons, pharmaceuticals, nuclear materials, body parts, metals, precious stones, natural resources, stolen cars, art, antiques, rare animals and counterfeit goods
- Illicit services — gambling and the sex trade in particular
- Cybercrime, robbery, kidnapping, extortion, corruption and piracy
- Terrorism
Note how much of this is ordinary commerce conducted illegally. That is Glenny’s point: these are businesses, and they behave like businesses.
Where Organised Crime Thrives
Glenny argues that criminal networks become most powerful where several conditions come together:
- A weak rule of law — failed states, and states in transition from one political system to another
- Public distrust of the state — where people do not regard the government as legitimate, they are more willing to deal with those who operate outside it. Italy and Mexico are the standard examples
- Inaccessible terrain — mountains, jungle and long unpoliceable coastlines. Peru and Colombia
- High levels of corruption — officials who can be bought
- Easy access to weapons
- Access to transnational networks — the connections that turn a local criminal operation into part of a global supply chain
This list is the most useful thing in the post, because it is a set of causes rather than a set of examples. If a question asks why global crime has increased, these are your points.
Bulgaria: The Worked Example
Bulgaria sits geographically between the wealthy and poor parts of the world, and it is Glenny’s central European case.
When Communism collapsed in 1989, the Bulgarian state effectively lost control of large parts of its economy overnight. The security services were disbanded, leaving thousands of trained and well-connected men without work, and state assets were privatised at speed with almost no regulation. Criminal organisations moved into the gap and acquired considerable power.
The consequence is that a very large proportion of the drugs consumed in the UK, and many of the women trafficked into the UK sex trade, have moved through Bulgarian networks at some point.
HOWEVER, it is worth pausing on what that actually shows. The demand is in Western Europe. Glenny’s argument is not that Bulgaria is criminal and Britain is not — it is that a wealthy consumer market and a country with weak institutions become two ends of the same supply chain. That is the analytical point, and in my experience it is the one students most often miss.
Glocal Organisation: Hobbs and Dunnighan
Dick Hobbs and Colin Dunnighan (1998) provide the main evaluation of Glenny, and it is the one to know. (You will sometimes see the name spelled “Dunningham”, including in some textbooks — the correct spelling is Dunnighan.)
Their chapter ‘Glocal Organised Crime: Context and Pretext’, published in The New European Criminology, draws on an ethnographic study of criminal networks in the north east of England. Hobbs also set out the argument in ‘Going Down the Glocal’ in the Howard Journal the same year.
They argue that large, hierarchical criminal organisations of the kind the word “Mafia” conjures up are not dominant. Most global crime instead operates through a glocal system: a global distribution network assembled out of local connections.
Local cannabis growers deliver into a supply chain that eventually feeds a global market of users. Colombian drug producers use the same kind of locally rooted networks to move their product to the world. At every stage the people involved are embedded in a particular place, with particular contacts, doing business with people they know.
The difference matters. Glenny’s account implies that tackling global crime means confronting large transnational organisations. Hobbs and Dunnighan’s implies that global crime is a network of local operations, which is far harder to police because there is no organisation to decapitate.
Evaluating Glenny
In favour. The research is extensive and international in a way very little criminology is, and Glenny’s conditions-for-organised-crime framework explains why some places develop powerful criminal networks and others do not. It also connects crime to political and economic change — the end of Communism, deregulation, the opening of borders — rather than treating it as a matter of individual criminality.
Against. It is journalism, not sociology: there is no sampling strategy, no stated methodology and no way to check the figures. The 15% estimate cannot be verified and is not stable across Glenny’s own accounts of it. Hobbs and Dunnighan’s ethnographic evidence directly contradicts the “McMafia” framing by showing criminal networks remaining stubbornly local. And left realists would argue that a focus on glamorous transnational crime distracts attention from the ordinary street crime that most affects working class victims — a criticism that applies to this whole topic.
Marxists would add that the account is incomplete. Glenny identifies globalisation as the driver, but for Marxists the cause is capitalism specifically — including the entirely legal activities of transnational corporations, which Glenny largely leaves out.
Contemporary Relevance (2026 update)
McMafia was dramatised by the BBC as an eight-part series, McMafia, which aired in 2018 — worth mentioning because it put the argument in front of a large audience, and because students sometimes arrive having watched it.
The book is now well over fifteen years old, and the specific cases date from the 1990s and 2000s. The framework has held up better than the examples: the conditions Glenny identified continue to describe where organised crime concentrates. But an answer that uses only Glenny is using evidence from a world before widespread cryptocurrency, encrypted messaging and ransomware, all of which have changed how criminal networks move money and communicate. Pair Glenny with something current if you can — the framework is sound, the examples have aged.
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Sources used to write this post
- Glenny, M. (2008) McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. London: Bodley Head
- Hobbs, D. and Dunnighan, C. (1998) ‘Glocal Organised Crime: Context and Pretext’, in The New European Criminology
- Hobbs, D. (1998) ‘Going Down the Glocal: The Local Context of Organised Crime’, The Howard Journal 37(4)
Signposting and Related Posts
This post has been written primarily for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).
The main post on this area is globalisation and crime, which covers global crime types, their extent and the sociological perspectives on them — read that first if you are starting the topic.
Global crime overlaps with state crime, where governments are the offenders, and with green crime, much of which is global by nature. For cybercrime specifically see what is cybercrime.
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