’Unholy Alliances’: How Transnational Terrorists and Crime Make Common Cause

Trans-state political terrorism is a strategy used in pursuit of ethnonational, religious, or revolutionary objectives. International organized crime, in contrast, seeks material gain by smuggling weapons, drugs, consumer goods, and humans as well as by illegal fund transfers. How do these two types of "global bads" make common cause? Under what conditions do politically motivated terrorists cooperate with international criminal cartels and networks, and vice versa? A major challenge in the building of such an explanatory model is its complex dependent variable demanding explanation for the interaction of two conceptually distinct motives for joint action.