354 TO WHAT EXTENT DO GLOBAL TERRORISM AND ORGANISED CRIMINALITY CONVERGE?: GENERAL PARAMETERS AND CRITICAL SCENARIOS 1. Introduction Two lines converge when their courses interchange or they meet at one point. This may also occur with the paths that terror and other criminal activities plot out. Without establishing a wholly new subject, the study of the actual – or potential- convergence between terrorist activity and organised crime has been gaining interest in recent times. As Walter Laqueur1 has stated –a renowned historian to whom we owe some of the first and the most significant academic studies on political violence: while up to fifteen years ago, all concepts postulated a sharp division between terrorism and organised crime2, with the passing of time the border that separates them has become increasingly blurred. In recent years, the change in perspective has gone so far that some experts suggest the necessity of doing away with this distinction, at least for certain cases of a clear symbiosis between one phenomenon and the other. Some of the information and focuses provided by the mass media tend to reinforce this new approach, whether by means of news reports that assure us the involvement of terrorist groups and organisations in typical activities of common or organised crime, or by attributing characteristics of an unquestionably Mafioso nature to others. In short, the opinion has started to spread that the convergence between terrorism and organised crime could come to be a growing trend within the geo-political framework inaugurated at the end of the XX century3. There are various factors for change that would push us toward that direction. On the one hand, the end of the Cold War and the proliferation of anti-terrorist laws have drastically reduced the willingness of States to sponsor terrorist groups or organisations, inducing them to use other means of financing (including those relating to conducting illegal activities). 1 LAQUEUR, Walter. The New Terrorism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 2 Hereinafter the terms “organised crime”, “organised criminality” and “organised delinquency” will be taken to be synonymous expressions. 3 MAKARENKO, Tamara. “The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism”, Global Crime, vol. 6, nº 1, 2004, 129-145.
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