128 DIGGING OUT A HISTORY OF ORGANISED CRIME Mark Galeotti 1 What are the security issues defining the twenty-first century? Despite the attention paid to terrorism, I would contend that it is organised and transnational crime, both in its own right and also as a facilitator for so many other problems, from millenarian violence to environmental degradation. After all, where do today’s bombers tend to get their explosives and false IDs? From criminals? And who make massive profits from circumventing laws on the safe, clean disposal of toxic wastes? Criminals again. My own professional trajectory has tracked the evolution of security studies, from pre-1991 concerns about armed conflict between two opposed blocs through to a modern era of networked, transnational non-state actors. As such, I find myself bisected between two separate, but complementary areas of interdisciplinary study. On the one hand, I explore the contemporary challenges, in particular those posed by Russian and other post-Soviet criminal networks, which in turn connect and work with a range of other ‘dark networks’, from Sicilian mafiosi to Afghan warlords. On the other, I stick to my first love, history, and work on the place of organised crime within societies, both for its intrinsic merits and also the insights it provides into wider questions of state-building, law and legitimacy. After all, it is a common and tempting conceit that organised crime is an essentially modern phenomenon. Certainly, it has developed at a dramatic pace since the beginning of the twentieth century, such that it now operates across the world, dominates an underworld turnover estimated (very crudely) at one trillion dollars annually and is second only to Islamic terrorism in most Western states’ nightmares. Yet while many of the basic textbooks seem to think that organised crime began with the migrations of the Irish and Italians to the United States in the nineteenth century – especially daring works may present the pirates of the Spanish Main as primordial Mafiosi – in practice it appears that organised crime in some form and to some degree has been around as long as organised societies. 1 Academic Chair and Clinical Professor of Global Affairs, Center for Global Affairs, New York University mark.galeotti@nyu.edu