Organised Crime, Terror and Insecurity in Africa (OCTA)
Investigating the interface between organised crime and terrorism in Kenya, Mozambique and Nigeria, focusing on local experiences.
The crime-terror nexus has become an increasingly popular term amid warnings that the ‘evil twins’ of criminality and terrorism can erode political, economic and social stability, undermine security and hinder development processes. Yet the majority of research in this area is dominated by donors and national governments and focuses on top-down understandings of the relationship between these two threats. It also focuses narrowly on legally defined organised crime and terrorist groups, while underplaying state actors’ involvement in generating insecurity through corruption, criminality and violence. Such an approach means that the reality on the ground may be overlooked, to the detriment of effective responses.
Our three-year project (2022–2025) explores the interface between organised crime and terrorism in Kenya, Nigeria and Mozambique from the bottom up. It prioritises local experiences and understandings of crime, terrorism and any convergence of the two, adopting a broad approach to examine state and non-state actors’ roles in either providing security or generating insecurity.
Project team
Dr Liam O’Shea
Senior Research Fellow
Organised Crime and Policing
Genevieve Kotarska
Research Analyst
Organised Crime and Policing
Mark Williams
Outreach and Implementation Coordinator
Organised Crime and Policing
Michael Jones
Research Fellow
Terrorism and Conflict
Christopher Hockey
Research Fellow
RUSI Nairobi
Dr Jessica White
Senior Research Fellow
Terrorism and Conflict
Dr Joana de Deus Pereira
Senior Research Fellow
RUSI Europe
Stephen Reimer
Research Fellow
Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies
Tom Keatinge
Director, CFCS
Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies
Dr Keith Ditcham
Acting Director / Senior Research Fellow
Organised Crime and Policing
External organisations
Conciliation Resources, Nigeria
Centro Para Democracia e Desenvolvimento, Mozambique
Centre for Human Rights and Policy Studies, Kenya
Aims and objectives
This project addresses gaps in our knowledge and understanding of organised crime, terrorism and any overlap between the two by building on the existing knowledge base, while putting local involvement, inputs and lived experience at the forefront of our research. The project works with in-country partners and stakeholders from a variety of sectors to generate new evidence and gain a fuller understanding of organised crime, terrorism and their potential convergence.
The project aims to provide evidence-based and context-specific policy recommendations to address organised crime, terrorism and any crime-terror nexus, with a focus on building local resilience through practical efforts. In doing so, the project seeks to explore what contextual factors have caused previous security policy recommendations to fail in developing countries, and how future ones might succeed.
Targeted recommendations will be shared with key stakeholders through formal dialogues and local engagement, to improve how governments, donors and cross-sector partners conceive of and respond to the crime-terror nexus.
Project sponsor
Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
This project is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
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