Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
How organizations deal with crisis says a lot about their agility and resilience. By early 2022, the GI-TOC had largely emerged from one devastating global crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, only to find that the world was soon watching with horror as another unfolded in Ukraine. With that invasion, the organized crime landscape is shifting once again, and the situation looks bleak. The trajectories of organized crime are set to worsen.
The pandemic, however, had taught us that by remaining focused on our core strategy – to reduce the global harms caused by organized crime – there is opportunity to be found in crisis. Our programme of work to identify and address the links between the pandemic and illicit global economies and networks was valuable, productive and innovative; and with an agreement now in place to establish the Ukraine Observatory of Illicit Markets and Conflict, we are confident that this new project will be another bold step towards achieving our founding principle of catalyzing a global strategy against transnational organized crime.
This report sets out some of the organization’s major achievements in the 2022/23 reporting period.
In 2021, the GI-TOC formulated a medium-term strategy over three years, to position ourselves as the leading global civil society organization dealing with transnational organized crime and develop more effective responses to this global threat. Midway through this period, we have achieved nearly three-quarters of our goals set and are making progress towards completing those that remain.
In 2022, the organization continued to expand in terms of staff numbers to help us meet the challenges of this global threat and the targets we have set ourselves in our strategy to achieve this. In 2022, the staff size reached and surpassed the 100 mark. At the time of writing, we have employees of 41 nationalities working in 34 countries, over 50% of whom are from developing countries. The Global Initiative Network of Experts (the ‘Network’), the GI-TOC’s key resource body, grew to over 600 members. Through targeted recruitment, we are increasing Network membership from the developing world and actively recruiting female experts.
In terms of regional growth, in May we established a presence in Thailand overseen by a programme manager to allow us to better develop our programmes of research and engagement in Asia-Pacific, and to establish a more formal, consolidated footprint in the region following the launch of the Asia-Pacific Observatory in 2020.
The Observatory of Illicit Economies in West Africa has made considerable programmatic progress across the region since it launched in June 2021, exploring the links between organized crime and regional instability, and has developed networks and coverage in 18 countries. Our engagement in Guinea-Bissau continues to support and strengthen civil society in the country, including through dialogues to foster relationships between communities and government stakeholders, and through analysis of the country’s illicit economies.
In Latin America, we now have a presence in 11 countries, with teams developing ways to increase resilience to criminality, violence and conflict in communities, and helping combat the culture of extortion in Central America through network partnerships, dialogues and coalitions.
Our work covering North Africa and the Sahel has extended its scope to include wider regional coverage of the hubs, routes and flows of illicit markets. Meanwhile we are consolidating our coverage in Western and Central Asia.
The regional observatory model has begun to coalesce and show fruitful outcomes. With field networks coordinated through the regional observatories, and supported by the organization’s central analytical capacity as well as the multisectoral perspectives provided by the Network of Experts, our granular regional knowledge is providing critical cross-regional analysis and monitoring, and connecting peer networks of communities for resilience around the world.
Despite the challenges brought by the pandemic, our sound approach to financial foresight and planning, an expanding base of financial partners ready to support our strategy with funding and a well-managed approach to expenditure have continued to ensure the financial health of the organization. Financially, 2022 was another positive year for the GI-TOC. Total projected income for year end 2022 is over CHF 15 million, up by approximately 12% against 2021. Once again, clean audits were received for the three financial–legal entities for the previous fiscal year.
The GI-TOC’s publications and multimedia outputs are a central part of our global strategy. In 2022, we increased the total number of publications by 44%, or 48 more publications against the previous year’s total. Of these, 37 were translated into 13 target languages, which provides greater audience reach and aligns our publications work with the overarching organizational mandate to be a global network in action against transnational organized crime.
Major milestones achieved this year in terms of our research publications included a report on organized criminal economies in the rebel Donbas region of Ukraine; an innovative methodology to map and monitor West African crime hubs; critical research and monitoring of criminal markets and gang networks conducted in South Africa, which culminated in the publication of a flagship national risk assessment of organized crime markets in South Africa. Meanwhile, a study on Cambodia investigates the actors and networks behind the illegal logging economy. This year, we published a major report on how seaports in the Balkan peninsula facilitate regional and international illicit trade; a series of papers monitoring human trafficking and smuggling dynamics in six countries in coastal North Africa and the Sahel; and a paper providing an overview of the sources and flows feeding the global illegal firearms trade.
The multimedia strategy has continued to promote the work of the GI-TOC’s initiatives and our participation at events through bespoke digital content on several platforms. Among the highlights of 2022 were the production of ‘social first’ video content and reaching the milestone of 5 000 users on YouTube. Meanwhile, 39 new episodes of the podcast series were released in the first half of the year, and the series is gaining a steadily growing audience. The ‘Deep Dive: Exploring organized crime’ series was nominated as best investigative podcast at the 2022 Publisher Podcast Awards.
The GI-TOC’s engagement with the multilateral community on transnational organized crime has always been a pillar of our work. Although we have faced some challenges, this has not deterred us from contributing substantively to key debates involving organized crime in the multilateral forums, coordinating civil society support and expert engagement in the UNTOC process. This year, among several other activities, we have closely tracked the progress through the UN of a proposed international convention on countering the use of information and communications technologies for criminal purposes. Since the process got underway at the UN, the GI-TOC has provided analysis of the negotiations and acted as a convener of civil society organizations and external stakeholders.
The Resilience Fund has supported just under 150 grantees in 50 countries. In 2022, the initiative, which has received new and continued funding from four governments, saw the launch of the 2022 Resilience Fund Fellowship and a Resilience Fund Community Platform was established to raise the profile of civil society organizations among a wider public.
Currently in preparation for its second iteration in 2023, the Global Organized Crime Index has been extended in scope to include analysis of five new criminal markets and one new criminal actor category, to take into account the fast-changing nature of transnational organized crime.
Our work on environmental crime economies, across the regional observatories, has involved highly innovative approaches, including piloting strategies to disrupt online trade in illegal wildlife products and pioneering investigations into global trafficking networks.
The database and analysis of global assassinations, the Assassination Monitor, continues to inform our understanding of the impact of organized crime around the world, providing critical insight into ways in which violence as a ‘service’ is monetized.
The GI-TOC Global Board has continued to provide governance, oversight and strategic direction for the organization as a whole, while the African Board oversees the work of the three observatories in the continent. We have continued to ensure that board members are gender- and geographically representative.
Today, the world is facing mounting geopolitical hostility, conflict, socio-economic crisis, statesponsored corruption and environmental destruction. These shocks to a global order we had taken for granted since the end of World War II are largely driven by the wide-reaching forces of organized criminal economies.
In such a context, the GI-TOC continues to provide the evidence base and analytical frameworks to enable better understanding of the impact of criminal networks and illicit flows in conflict zones. Through the Ukraine observatory we will examine how to reduce the impact of criminal networks in a post-war reconstruction context and analyze the impact of sanctions, with an emphasis on our work on illicit financial flows. This analysis will complement our studies of other conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria.
In an environment of increasing conflict and criminality, we will continue to work to build the global strategy and develop the networks of resilience that are urgently needed to address this global challenge.