Globalisation and Crime

Last Updated on September 25, 2026 by Karl Thompson

The AQA Sociology Crime and Deviance Specification specifies that students must examine (among other things!) ‘globalisation and crime in contemporary society’.

Questions sociologists might ask about Globalisation and crime….

1. How has globalisation affected crime in contemporary society?
2. What are global crimes?
3. What is the extent of global crime?
4. What are the consequences of global crimes for individuals and society? (relating to crime control)
5. Why has global crime increased? (It’s a reasonable assumption that it has as it’s relatively new on the specification, albeit 20 years out of date as is often the case with AQA A-level sociology).

You will need to be able to link your answers to these questions to other aspects of the Crime and Deviance Specification (when talking about consequences you might distinguish between effects on men and women, for example), and you need to be able to apply sociological perspectives.

Before we turn to looking at the relationship between globalisation and crime, it is worth reviewing the concept of globalisation, itself one of the most important concepts A-level sociology students need to know!

What is globalisation?

Globalisations is where different regions around the world becoming increasingly interconnected resulting in increasing flows of the following:

• economic globalisation means more global trade (the increasing movement of goods and services between countries) and more Transnational companies.
• cultural globalisation means more communication between people and the intermixing of ideas, often resulting in ‘hybrid’ cultures.
• There is also the increasing migration of people – for study, work, flight from wars (refugees) and (for the wealthy) holidays, which has elements of both cultural and economic globalisation.
• There isalso a ‘technological’ underpinning to globalisation – transport and communications technologies especially.

Unfortunately a downside of globalisation is an increase in global crime. More trade has meant more opportunity for illegal smuggling of goods, and part of migration is illegal people smuggling. The fact that we are instantly connected via the internet has also increased the amount of international cyber crime.

For more information on Globalisation, check out my ‘Global Development and Globalisation‘ web page – there are several links which will allow you to explore the concept further!

What are Global Crimes?

Global crimes are those which occur in more than one region of the world. In most global crimes the criminals are in one country and the victims are in another. Some global crimes involve the illegal movement of goods, people, or money across international borders.

There are different ways of classifying global crimes, but one way we can do this is as follows:

• Trafficking – moving drugs, people and/ or weapons across international borders
• Cyber Crimes – such as phising attacks, extortion and fraud
• Financial crimes – such as tax evasion.
• International terrorism.
• Most (if not all?) green crimes are also global in nature.

Who commits global crime?

Many different actors commit global crimes.

Some of the above global crimes are carried out by lone operators, some by organised criminal networks (some people consider ‘organised crime’ to be a category of crime in its own right), some by governments themselves (state crimes) and some by Corporations.

What is the extent of global crime?

Trafficking

The Global Financial Integrity Report on Transnational Crime estimates that the total global value of all trafficking is between $1.6 to $2.2 trillion, with drug trafficking making up the largest share, around 30% of this, with a global value of around $500 billion.

Drug Trafficking

According to The United Nations World Drug Report , globally in 2022 an estimated 292 million people used a drug in the last year. This equivalent to 5.4 per cent of the population and an increase from 269 million in 2018.

Most of this increase has been in the use of cannabis, closely followed by amphetamines and cocaine.

Cyber Crime

Back in 2016, Cybersecurity Ventures predicted that cyber crime would cost the world $6 trillion by 2021, rising to $20 trillion by 2026.

NB you might want to be cautious with these statistics because the company which did the research sells cyber security protection, so it’s in their interests to exaggerate the risks! Both of those dates have now passed, which makes this a useful little case study in itself: nobody can actually verify a global figure for the cost of cyber crime, because most of it is never reported, and the loudest estimates come from companies with something to sell. Treat any headline number on cyber crime as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement — and say so in an exam, because that IS an evaluation point.

Nonetheless this is something governments and companies take very seriously.

A couple of important aspects mentioned in the article are that RansomWare is one of the fastest growing types of cyber crime – where your computer is hacked and data frozen, only to be released when you have paid a ransom (this may not be too much of a hassle for an individual, but if companies or government agencies are victims this is a much bigger deal).

Also, a lot of cyber crime takes place in the Deep and Dark Web, thought to be several times greater than what we can see online (visible, accessible public networks), and this is also related increasingly to drug trafficking – increasingly people buy and sell drugs via the deep and dark web.

Tax Havens and Tax Evasion

The IMF estimates that there are several trillions of dollars of Corporate Funds stashed away in tax havens, costing the tax payer between $500 to $600 billion in lost tax revenue (so a similar financial cost to the value of drug crime).

Estimates for how much individual wealth (rather than Corporate wealth) is stashed in tax havens are more varied, given the secrecy surrounding these funds, but two estimates cited by the IMF are from between $8 trillion to more than $30 trillion, costing the taxpayer around $200 billion a year in lost revenue.

The existence of tax havens such as the Cayman Islands also allows organised crime gangs to launder the profits of illegal activities such as drug production and distribution, because tax havens are designed to make the movement of money difficult to track. So the same infrastructure that lets corporations avoid tax lets criminal networks wash their money – which is a neat illustration of how elite crime and organised crime share the same plumbing.

[IMAGE: move tax-havens-map.png here from the Capitalism, Globalisation and Crime post before that post is folded in. 1473×845, World Economic Forum. Caption: “A map of tax havens and which countries lose most revenue.” Alt text: “Map showing tax havens and the countries losing most tax revenue”]

There is a conceptual problem with labelling the use of tax havens as ‘criminal’ – companies and individuals often use loopholes in the law to get their funds out of countries where they are taxed and into tax havens where they are not taxed, or taxed at a very low rate, so we have to use a broader definition of crime as something which is harmful (through lost tax revenue) to ensure we include the use of tax havens in our examples of global crime.

Global Terrorism

Trends in global terrorism are going down (so some rare good news!).

According to the Global Terrorism Index 2026, published in March 2026 by the Institute for Economics and Peace, 5,582 people were killed in 2,944 terrorist attacks during 2025 – a fall of 28% on the previous year, and the lowest global figure since 2007. That is down from a peak of around 34,500 deaths in 2014.

Terrorism is also becoming much more concentrated. Just five countries accounted for around 70% of deaths in 2025, and the Sahel region of Africa alone for more than half. Pakistan topped the index for the first time, with 1,139 deaths. More than 90% of terrorism deaths take place in countries already experiencing armed conflict.

HOWEVER – and this is where it gets interesting – the global figure conceals a sharp reversal in the West, where terrorism deaths rose by 280% in 2025, to 57. European incidents doubled to 67. Almost all of this is lone actors: 93% of fatal attacks in the West over the past five years were carried out by individuals rather than organisations.

Two evaluation points worth having ready here. The first is that a falling global figure and a rising Western one can both be true at once, which is why a statistic quoted without its geography tells you almost nothing. The second is more awkward for this topic: if Western attackers are radicalising online and acting alone, then the global criminal NETWORK that globalisation supposedly enabled has dropped out of the picture altogether.

While terrorism is often very locally felt, many of the groups who claim responsibility for these attacks are responding to global dynamics and see themselves as part of a global network, so they are a response to globalisation.

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How has globalisation affected crime in contemporary society?

This is one of the more complex questions we can ask in A-level sociology, and there are several possible ways we can break down our analysis, and a lot of interconnecting ideas where ever we start.

Below I’ve started with the concept of globalisation and considered how economic and cultural globalisation have opened up more opportunities for people and organisations to engage in certain types of crime and how the nature and extent of crime has changed as a result.

Economic globalisation and global crime

Economic globalisation refers to increasing amounts of global trade and money, the increasing role of Transnational Corporations, the spread of an international division of labour, and (importantly from a broadly Marxist point of view) increasing amounts of inequality between rich and poor regions around the world.

Increasing amounts of trade of goods across international borders and the fact that some countries tax certain goods, such as alcohol and cigarettes, have lead to increasing amounts of smuggling of such highly taxed products -organised criminal networks have emerged (e.g. think of the Mafia) who smuggle cigarettes and alcohol from countries where they are produced very cheaply to countries where they are taxed very highly, such as the UK – this is simple demand and supply, albeit illegal, and very common: there are plenty of poor people in the UK (for example) who want cheaper booze and cigarettes, and plenty of poor people in developing countries who are willing to risk jail time to traffic non-taxed booze and cigarettes to countries such as the UK.

The above also applies to the illegal trade in counterfeit goods, from clothes to electronics – all of these goods (as well as fags and booze) may present themselves as genuine, but in reality they are fake – but when there are so many containers of goods moving around the world (global trade is massive) there is significant opportunity for organised criminal networks to smuggle their cheaper counterfeit/ untaxed goods into shipping containers and get them to willing and often unwitting consumers in their destination countries.

Marxists are keen to point out that it’s not just criminal networks involved in global economic crime – so are many Transnational Corporations -it’s a bit more difficult to analyse the role of these in global crime as they are more likely to engage in ‘law evasion’ rather than actual crime – for example Shell extracting oil in Nigeria and taking advantage of the laxer pollution laws in that country, committing effectively no ‘crime’ by Nigerian standards, but an environmental crime nonetheless.

TNCs also engage in tax evasion as do many wealthy individuals by stashing their wealth in tax havens, again, not technically illegal, but harmful due to lost tax revenue.

Another way in which economic globalisation might fuel global crime is through increasing inequality – one rather horrible aspect of this is sex trafficking – there are plenty of men in developed countries looking for cheap prostitutes prepared to travel to countries such those in Eastern Europe to get what they want – and the young women they find there may well have been trafficked into sex-work on the promise of something else by organised criminal gangs – one of the darker sides of the global economy.

The supply of drugs from poorer countries to richer countries is another aspect of inequality fuelling this global trade.

Cultural globalisation and global crime

The increasing communications between cultures may have lead to more cultural clashes the world over, more ‘ordinary people’ coming into conflict with their more traditional political orders.

An obvious example of this is ‘liberated’ women in Iran posting pictures of themselves on Instagram and the State ‘cracking down on them‘, but there’s much more to it than this – radical interpretations of Islam have made their way to Britain and other European countries, shared and circulated online and contributed to various terror attacks over the last couple of decades.

However, it’s important not to exaggerate the extent to which exposure to new ideas results in ‘violent cultural clashes’, it’s quite possible that for the most part people online are just stuck in their bubbles (their social media bubbles, not meant here in the Pandemic sense of the word) and for the most part not inclined to criminal behaviour!

We could also point to the emergence of a set of ‘global human right’s outlined by the United Nations which proclaim that Nation States (governments) are not permitted to breach certain rights of individual citizens – making illegal at a global level things such as genocide, which opens up the possibilities of governments being held accountable as criminals, which couldn’t have happened before the UN HUMAN RIGHTS CONVENTION immediately after World War Two.

The Internet and Global Cyber Crime

The instantaneous connectivity through the internet deserves special mention in its own right in relation to global crime.

This probably more than ANYTHING else has changed the nature of crime across societies as it creates so many more opportunities for people anywhere in the world to commit crime and for people to be unwitting victims of crime.

It’s possible for one individual to send out literally millions of phishing emails or comments to millions of people in a single day in attempt to get them to click on a link which will (variably) try to elicit their personal information from them or get them to download some dodgy software which will collect their data from their computer.

The Deep Web and Dark Web also make it easier for people to trade in illegal goods and services online and to network and have conversations which may result in very serious criminal activities – think terrorist cells and child abuse rings – all made easier to maintain via the Dark Web.

A Marxist Analysis: Ian Taylor on Global Capitalism and Crime

Everything above describes HOW globalisation creates opportunities for crime. Marxists argue that this misses the cause: it isn’t globalisation as such that generates crime, it’s the global spread of capitalism.

The general Marxist case — that capitalism is criminogenic, that the law is made in the interests of the elite, and that law enforcement is selective — is covered on my post on the Marxist theory of crime, along with Chambliss, Gordon, Snider and Tombs and Whyte. What follows here is the specifically GLOBAL version of the argument.

Ian Taylor, writing from a socialist perspective, argued that economic globalisation has generated a great deal of crime by elites which goes largely unnoticed in the West. Writing in 1998, he identified three changes in the world economy, all of which have accelerated since.

Global finance and tax havens

For elites, the ability to move money around the world with minimal control enables a whole range of financial crimes – tax evasion, insider trading, and defrauding transnational bodies such as the EU out of grant and subsidy money. The tax haven figures given earlier in this post are the scale of it.

Transnational corporations and law evasion

This is the most important idea in Taylor’s analysis, and the one most worth learning, because it describes something that is harmful but not illegal.

Law evasion is where a corporation moves an activity to a country where that activity is legal, rather than stopping it. The harm is identical; only the jurisdiction changes. Poorer countries tend to have weaker environmental and labour regulation, so a corporation can pollute more freely and employ people more cheaply there – and commits no offence in doing so.

TNCs also subcontract production to local firms, which encourages the employment of people working illegally, since it is cheaper to hire workers who will accept less than the minimum wage. This is common in clothing, food and construction. Subcontractors break rules to cut costs in order to win and keep contracts in highly competitive industries.

Examples of law evasion: Apple in China, Shell in Nigeria, Primark in Bangladesh.

Case study: Union Carbide in Bhopal

The Bhopal disaster is the clearest illustration of law evasion there is, and the best case study to use in an exam answer on this topic.

Union Carbide, an American-owned multinational, built a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, to take advantage of cheap labour – and, investigations later established, because pollution controls in India were less rigid than in the USA.

In 1984 the plant leaked deadly gas into the surrounding atmosphere. The leak killed over 3,500 people and caused permanent injury to at least 25,000 more. It was caused by inadequate safety procedures at the plant, making it a criminal case of negligence.

Campaigners report an unusually high incidence of birth defects, growth deficiency, cancers, diabetes and other chronic illnesses in Bhopal – not only among survivors of the leak but among people born many years afterwards.

Union Carbide paid $470 million (£282 million) in compensation to the Indian government. In 2010, twenty-six years after the disaster, eight people were sentenced to two years each for negligence. All eight were Indian. No one on the company’s board has ever faced criminal charges.

That last sentence is the whole argument in miniature. A corporation relocated a dangerous process to a country with weaker rules, thousands of people died, and the people punished were all local employees of a company owned elsewhere.

Increasing global inequality

A further effect of TNCs being mobile is reduced job security for full-time staff, and growth in part-time, temporary and insecure employment – which in turn breeds the conditions for criminality, in developed and developing countries alike.

Evaluation. Taylor’s analysis explains elite and corporate crime, which accounts of global crime focused on trafficking and gangs leave out entirely. It also explains why so much global harm is legal. HOWEVER, it is economically deterministic: it doesn’t explain why the overwhelming majority of people exposed to these conditions never commit crime at all.

What are the consequences of global crimes for individuals and society?

Here we really need to take a global development perspective and think of winners and losers at a global level.

Certainly global crime has created many losers from developing countries – anyone trafficked into the sex industry or any drug mules caught and sent to jail, and several migrants who have paid their life savings to then NOT be transported successfully to their destination countries.

But then again, you could see this as an opportunity – drugs are part of global trade – and there is more money to made in growing Cocaine than Coffee for some farmers in Colombia – possibly opening up better opportunities than ‘free trade as usual’ – NB not to say this will always be the case as being involved in the global drugs market probably isn’t that SAFE.

And it’s not necessarily the case that the consumers in the west are the winners – they may also be victims, of poor quality cigarettes and booze for example.

Where cyber crime is concerned it’s more hidden – there are probably more victims alive today that DON’T know about it than ever before in human history.

Finally, global crime is a problem for governments – it takes a lot of resources and co-ordination to combat global crime, especially when so much of it is online and thus not visible.

And where some of more heinous crimes are concerned, this increases our sense of fear and vulnerability and uncertainty – such as with global terrorism.

Why is Global Crime so Difficult to Control?

Global crime creates a problem that national criminal justice systems were never designed to solve.

Jurisdiction. In most global crimes the offender is in one country and the victim in another. A national police force has authority within its own borders and nowhere else, so investigating a crime whose perpetrator sits in another jurisdiction requires the cooperation of that country’s government – and that cooperation is voluntary.

Sovereignty. States guard their sovereignty closely, and are often reluctant to allow foreign investigators to operate on their territory or to extradite their own citizens. Where a government benefits from the criminal activity, or is implicated in it, cooperation won’t happen at all.

There is no international court for most global crime. The International Criminal Court in The Hague prosecutes individuals for the most serious crimes – genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity. There is no equivalent court for trafficking, smuggling or cyber crime. Prosecution of those falls back to individual countries, whose governments may not be willing to pursue it. (Note the distinction, because it is commonly muddled: the International Court of JUSTICE hears disputes between states; the International CRIMINAL Court prosecutes individuals.)

Some countries do not want the trade stopped. This is the point most students miss, and it is the strongest one available. Criminal networks supplying heroin to Europe are a significant source of income in Afghanistan and Bulgaria. The obstacle is therefore not only whether a country CAN cooperate but whether it wants to – and the British government, whatever it spends on enforcement, can ultimately only police its own borders.

International bodies have limited powers. Interpol and Europol coordinate information between national forces, but they have no power to arrest anyone. Actual enforcement always falls back to a national police force operating under national law.

Definitional differences. An act that is criminal in one country may be perfectly legal in another, which is a particular problem for financial crime. The tax haven example above is the clearest case: moving money to avoid tax is often entirely lawful in both the country the money left and the country it arrived in, which is exactly why we needed a definition of crime based on harm rather than law to include it at all.

The internet removes distance altogether. A phishing operation can target victims in a hundred countries simultaneously from a single location. Perpetrators of online fraud typically remain hidden, using VPNs and similar techniques to conceal their identity and location, and encrypted communications and cryptocurrency make both the messages and the money difficult to follow.

The obvious implication is that controlling global crime requires international agreements and institutions – which is precisely what is hardest to build. The difficulty of establishing an international law of ecocide, or of persuading powerful states to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, both make the point.

Why has global crime increased?

It’s easy (lazy?) to see the increase of crime as an ‘inevitable’ response to Globalisation – with more flows of goods and people and ideas, SOME of that is going to be illegal.

There’s also an underlying technological change we need to consider – the internent does make crime easier.

But to answer this question with any analytical depth, you need to be able to apply the perspectives.

From a Marxist point of view this is due to the spread of Global Capitalism – creating more inequalities which results in inequities in supply and demand – plenty of poor people who can’t make decent money growing coffee would rather risk growing Cocaine, for example.

Another aspect of a Marxist analysis is the spread of TNCs engaged in law evasion and also tax evasion by elites.

Misha Glenny has researched the role of Organised criminal networks in facilitating the rise of Global Crime (the McMafia as he calls them) pointing out that the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s resulted in a massive increase in organised crime in countries such as Bulgaria – trafficking a lot of goods to Western Europe – here it’s not so much ‘legal capitalism’ which is the problem, rather criminal gangs operating outside the law in several countries.

You can also apply Feminism in order to help understand sex trafficking in particular.

Interactionism is also relevant because changes in international law, and national laws can criminalise acts and thus ‘increase’ global crime overnight – the United Nations Human Rights Conventions did this with State crimes, for example. And the same thing is happening with many green or enviromental crimes.

Not to say that these legal changes are bad, but they do increase the amount of crime simply by making acts illegal that previously were not, such as genocide and several forms of pollution.

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Signposting and Related Posts

This material is relevant to the Crime and Deviance module, where globalisation and crime appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).

For the organised crime side of this topic in more depth, see McMafia: Glenny on Globalisation and Global Criminal Networks, which covers Glenny’s research and the glocal criticism of it made by Hobbs and Dunnighan.

For cyber crime specifically, see What is Cybercrime?

Two closely related topics are usually taught alongside this one. State Crime covers crimes committed by governments, with worked cases in examples of state crimes. Green Crime covers environmental harm, much of which is global by nature and shares the same enforcement problem.

Three posts explore the harms of corporations further: arguments and evidence that transnational corporations harm developing countries, Union Carbide – the worst industrial accident in history, and the Marxist theory of crime.

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