When States Go Rogue

Global events have reaffirmed the need for criminology to account for new and complex conceptualisations of state criminality. The Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and then again in 2022 have been widely characterised not only as violations of international law but also as an example of hybrid warfare, where state crime is embedded as a geopolitical strategy. The Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD)'s studies over the years have illustrated Russia's use of sanctions evasion, illicit trade, disinformation campaigns, and cyber warfare as part of a broader strategy of influence and destabilisation. Such developments complicate traditional definitions of state crime and accountability, particularly as third-party states, private entities, and transnational non-state actors play key roles in facilitating or resisting these practices. Simultaneously, this is not merely a theoretical debate but one with urgent practical dimensions, increasingly recognised by key European institutions. Europol's latest Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (SOCTA) report explicitly warns how state actors exploit criminal infrastructures and illicit economies as part of broader geopolitical strategies, signalling an institutional shift toward acknowledging the convergence of statecraft and organised crime.

Structured in two main parts, bridging past and future, this article situates scholarly debates on state crime within the current geopolitical context, particularly concerning hybrid warfare, economic crime, and transnational illicit networks. The first section retrospectively analyzes the intellectual genealogy of state crime within criminology and related disciplines. It examines paradigmatic approaches – including harm-based models, human rights perspectives, and legalist and structural analyses – that have influenced and been influenced by rapid political and economic transformations of the 20th century. While foundational, these frameworks exhibit definitional ambiguities, methodological limitations, and neglected areas, prompting questions about their adequacy in capturing contemporary state criminality.

The second part takes a prospective turn to analyse what we term strategic state-sponsored criminality – a distinct assemblage of criminal practices that are coordinated, instrumentalized, and embedded within hybrid warfare. Drawing on current landscape – marked by Russia's weaponization of illicit networks (but also Iran's strategic use of cybercrime, China's state-backed economic coercion, etc.), we call for a rethinking of how we define, study, and address state criminality. Besides previous calls to anticipate future state crimes, the present moment demands a recalibration of criminological imagination. As the boundaries between governance, legality, and criminality become increasingly porous, it is imperative to reconsider whether state crime remains an aberration in the international order or has instead become a structural feature of contemporary power relations.

Tracing Theoretical Legacies on State Criminality: A Retrospective Look

Dawn L. Rothe has convincingly argued that state crimes, such as genocides, state-sponsored terrorism, assassinations, etc., have resulted in more harm than conventional street crimes, yet have historically been understudied relative to traditional forms of criminality within criminology and criminal justice research. Early criminological thought, particularly in its positivist forms, focused on individual deviance, framing crime as a pathology of the working classes. For example, dominant theories by Lombroso positioned the state as a lawful authority, rendering crimes by those in positions of power, whether corporate executives or state actors almost unthinkable.

By the 1950s, a growing number of criminologists began to question these assumptions. Major atrocities, from the Holocaust to the Rwandan Genocide, challenged the notion that crime was solely the domain of individuals acting outside the law. Cold War-era covert operations, state-backed coups, and extensive state surveillance apparatuses in both capitalist and socialist blocs further demonstrated that states could perpetrate vast, coordinated acts of harm while maintaining a veneer of legality. The neoliberal economic turn of the 1980s and 1990s added further complexity, as some state-led economic restructuring programs, often implemented through austerity measures and structural adjustment, resulted in widespread economic and social harm, such as inequality, loss of social safety and security, etc. The emergence of global corporate networks and the proliferation of offshore zones led to expanding transnational organized crime networks and the obfuscation of ownership and perpetrator identification.

Coupled with financial crimes and deregulation policies that enabled corporate – political – state collusion or even state capture, these transformations raised critical questions about the blurred boundaries between harmful governance and state criminality. Furthermore, research by CSD has illustrated how in post-socialist contexts this turn introduced new dynamics of state-facilitated harm, as the privatization of public assets and the weakening of institutional oversight created fertile ground for state capture, in which private interests subvert public institutions for personal or political gain. These processes highlight how contemporary state crime often manifests not only through overt acts of violence but also through the structural enabling of corruption, illicit trade, and the erosion of democratic accountability.

One of the first thinkers who marked a significant departure from mainstream criminology, Sutherland demonstrated that corporate crimes perpetrated by elites could be as harmful, if not more so than conventional street crimes. However, as later scholars noted, even Sutherland's pioneering work did not explicitly extend his critique to government institutions, even though corporate crime was often facilitated, ignored, or actively supported by the state. This omission highlighted the persistent legalistic bias, where crime was still conceptualized within the boundaries of existing legal frameworks rather than as a broader category of social harm – a problem that would later become central in definitional debates around state criminality.

A more radical shift in criminological thought emerged in the 1970s amid political unrest, anti-war mobilisations, and increasing exposure to state abuses. Marxist, structuralist, and critical criminological perspectives challenged traditional understandings by arguing that crime is not an objective, legally defined phenomenon but a socially constructed category shaped by power relations, illustrating how law itself is a political tool, that enables selective enforcement on crime. A key intervention came with Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which demonstrated how disciplinary power produces categories of criminality and deviance, legitimising state violence while criminalising resistance. This critique foregrounded the state's monopoly over legality as a crucial site of contestation, exposing how legal definitions are mobilised to shield state actors from accountability while expanding criminalisation toward dissenting populations.

These debates eventually culminated in a significant turning point with Chambliss' presidential address to the American Society of Criminology in 1989, where he directly called for the study of "state-organized crime." Identifying various forms of state-organized crime, including state complicity in piracy, coups d'état, assassinations, domestic surveillance, financial fraud, arms trafficking to sanctioned countries, and the sponsorship of terrorist activities, his work emphasized that state crime should not be understood merely as individual corruption or abuse of power but as an organizational and structural phenomenon often embedded within the rational functions of governance itself. This intervention marked a crucial step in paving the way for new theoretical perspectives that accounted for state criminality as an enduring feature of modern governance.

This intellectual shift also posed new challenges: if state criminality was not simply a matter of individual misconduct but instead could be woven into the fabric of governance, what analytical frameworks and criteria could capture its complexities, especially when states themselves controlled the legal apparatus that determined what counted as a crime? As scholars engaged with these emerging questions, the study of state crime increasingly became a battleground for new definitional debates, each offering different epistemological and methodological criteria for identifying state criminality. Michalowski outlined three primary theoretical models that shape criminological discourse on state crime: the juridical (legalistic) model, the conduct norms model, and the social harm model, which became central to understanding and contesting the boundaries of state criminality in the decades that followed:

Thus, as state scholarship moved forward towards the new century, the main challenge remained: how can criminologists account for the layered and various complexities of state criminality while at the same time ensuring that such acts do not escape accountability? These conceptual debates reflected a broader struggle to develop frameworks that account for power, structural violence, and global economic relations in response to the specific historical and geopolitical struggles of the times. It was the genocides of the late 20th century, the rapid rise of globalization, and the increasing collusion between state and corporate power that have all shaped criminological debates on how state crime should be understood and addressed. As new forms of state crimes emerge today, the question remains: are they still adequate for capturing the realities of contemporary state criminality?

State Criminality and Hybrid Warfare: Towards a Prospective Approach

If the dominant theoretical debates on criminality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries were shaped by large-scale atrocities – such as genocide, war crimes, authoritarian repression, and later, systemic human rights abuses, environmental degradation, and the erosion of public welfare under the guise of market rationality – today's scholarly conversations are increasingly shifting toward more covert, deniable, and networked forms of state action. The rise of hybrid warfare has played a central role in this shift.

Defined by Frank Hoffman as "any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behaviour," and by NATO as a strategy that blends conventional, irregular, and cyber warfare with disinformation and economic coercion, hybrid warfare targets a society's vulnerabilities across multiple domains to create confusion and strategic advantage. While not a form of crime itself, hybrid warfare constitutes the operational context in which new forms of state criminality unfold. Unlike conventional warfare, which relies on direct military engagement, hybrid warfare enables state actors to simultaneously deploy legal, semi-legal and entirely illegal tactics, using proxies, cyber criminals, and criminal and financial networks to achieve strategic objectives while maintaining plausible deniability.

In this evolving context, state criminality is no longer confined to overt acts of violence or repression. Instead, it increasingly manifests through covert, networked, and transborder aspects – blurring the lines between state and non-state, legal and illegal, public and private spheres. Authoritarian states in particular have begun to systematically weaponize and sponsor criminal networks, embedding them into their foreign policy arsenals as tools of influence, disruption, and survival. Such practices are increasingly central to how powers such as Russia, Iran, and China pursue advantage within the international system. Particularly in the context of heightened global tensions following Russia's 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, the integration of transnational criminal actors into state strategies has evolved into a deliberate and structured mode of warfare and governance, sometimes referred to as "organized crime as an instrument of statecraft." This shift complicates inherited definitions of state crime and calls for a conceptual reorientation.

While recent literature has introduced a series of overlapping terms such as geocriminality, state-organized crime, state-cybercrime, criminal statecraft, etc., there is still no systematic theoretical framework akin to those developed for earlier forms of state criminality in the 20th century. Clarifying how these terms are used, what forms of criminality they encompass, and how they relate to or diverge from organized crime is a necessary step forward.

This section adopts a prospective approach. It first examines recent empirical cases from Russia, alongside comparative insights from Iran and China, to illustrate how such less theories of contemporary state criminality function within the context of hybrid warfare. It then reviews and assesses the current scholarly landscape, culminating in a working agenda proposal for a more systematic and analytically rigorous framework to capture a distinct category of contemporary state criminality what we would define as strategic state-sponsored criminality – the deliberate, coordinated use of criminal practices by states or with state consent, to achieve geopolitical, economic, or security objectives. Unlike historical state criminality, which often involved direct repression or corruption by officials within the domestic sphere, this emergent form is characterized by its transnational scope, covert operational style, and instrumental use of non-state actors. It is this distinct assemblage of features that warrants a rethinking of both theoretical and policy frameworks.

Comparative Models of Strategic State-Sponsored Criminality Today

Contemporary strategic state-sponsored criminality takes on diverse forms depending on the state's geopolitical ambitions, institutional structure, and tactical needs. While Russia, Iran, and China all engage in practices that strategically blur the lines between state and illicit activity, they do so through slightly distinct models. These models – what we might term the militarized-criminal hybrid (Russia), the militia-criminal proxy model (Iran), and the corporate-criminal hybrid (China) – illustrate varying ways in which criminality is embedded into statecraft. Below, we trace these differences by examining each case in detail.

Russia: The Militarized-Criminal Hybrid

Russia represents perhaps the most well-documented case of a state that strategically deploys criminal networks and semi-legal actors to project influence and evade international legal repercussions. It exemplifies what is called a militarized-criminal hybrid: a governance structure where illicit actors are integral to statecraft, foreign policy, and warfare. The Kremlin Playbook series (2016–2025) has documented in detail how Russia operationalizes a state capture model – a systemic mode of governance in which economic, political, and media environments are reshaped to serve the interests of ruling elites and their strategic allies. This model involves the fusion of state and illicit networks, enabling the state to project influence beyond its borders while maintaining plausible deniability. While variations of state capture can be observed in other authoritarian contexts, including Iran and China, Russia's case stands out for the depth of integration between state institutions and proxy actors, combined with the ability to mask this integration within nominally legal, market-based, and democratic frameworks. This makes Russian state capture both structurally entrenched and uniquely deniable in the international arena.

As CSD and CSIS have illustrated, the Kremlin uses state capture as a model of domestic operation, and international influence, including the corrupt weaponisation of local ethnic warlords (Kadirov), private armies (Prigozhin), state enterprises (Gazprom), and organised crime. Mark Galeotti similarly argues that the Kremlin has developed a "weaponized underworld," integrating organized crime into its foreign policy toolkit with its use of criminal networks evolving from opportunistic collaborations in the post-Soviet era into a coherent and deliberate method of hybrid warfare.

This shift has become especially visible following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 when Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation pushed the Russian regime to further blur the boundaries between state, para-state, and criminal actors, emerging as a critical case study for the evolving forms of state criminality of the current geopolitical landscape.

Iran: The Militia-Criminal Proxy Model

Iran has developed an elaborate, and much better documented in time, model along similar patterns of state-criminal engagement as Russia, weaponising illicit markets to pursue strategic goals and circumvent global constraints. However, its model also employed some distinctive features, that we suggest understanding as a militia-criminal proxy model, shaped by its revolutionary ideology, geopolitical isolation, and regional ambitions. Rather than fully institutionalizing criminality within state structures, the Iranian state operates primarily through ideologically aligned non-state actors, paramilitary units, and illicit economic networks. As detailed in a 2024 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, Tehran has built extensive networks of criminal proxies and state-aligned enterprises to enhance its asymmetric warfare capabilities. Iran's regime relies heavily on such illicit partnerships to carry out assassinations, abductions, cyber-attacks, weapons smuggling, and sanctions evasion. Many of these activities are outsourced to criminal networks or ideologically aligned non-state actors, affording the state a degree of plausible deniability while advancing its geopolitical interests.

China: The Corporate-Criminal Hybrid

China, while operating through less overtly criminalized networks and relying on information suppression and strict international image control, has similarly been accused of fusing state strategy with illicit and coercive economic tactics. Chinese state-backed entities have engaged in widespread intellectual property theft and cyber-espionage campaigns targeting Western companies and institutions. These operations often rely on legitimate private firms or state-affiliated commercial entities that are covertly instrumentalized by the Chinese state to carry out strategic objectives. This tactic serves to obfuscate the state's role and complicate attribution, effectively transforming corporate actors into tools of foreign policy. Although not criminal organizations in the conventional sense, they are used to conduct illicit or coercive activities (e.g., intellectual property theft and cyber-espionage) under the guise of legality, thereby blurring the line between corporate enterprise and statecraft.

The Limits of Existing Frameworks: What Have We Missed?

The cases of Russia, Iran, and China underscore a fundamental transformation in contemporary state criminality: a shift from overt acts of violence and political repression to covert, networked, and hybrid forms. In this new landscape, state crime is characterized by sophisticated layers of plausible deniability, indirect operational strategies, and instrumental use of non-state actors. Contemporary state criminality incorporates the strategic deployment of transnational criminal networks, cyber operations, economic manipulation, and disinformation campaigns, all calibrated to serve geopolitical objectives and often under the broader rubric of hybrid warfare. States like Russia have normalized the use of organized criminal networks abroad, cyber criminals, and PMCs to carry out influence operations, espionage, sabotage, and ransomware attacks with minimal direct attribution. These networks are relied upon not only for kinetic operations but also for economic crimes such as sanctions evasion, money laundering and economic coercion.

While classical criminological literature has developed robust frameworks for analyzing state crime, these recent developments expose some of their limitations. Chambliss' concept of state-organized crime provides perhaps the closest parallel, particularly with his extensive examples of foreign intelligence's historical utilization of criminal networks, including drug traffickers, during the Cold War. Chambliss frames such practices within the context of structural contradictions inherent in capitalist states, whereby states face the inherent tension between maintaining legitimacy through adherence to laws and morality and pursuing capital accumulation and geopolitical dominance, often by illicit means. Similarly, Green and Ward have demonstrated that powerful political and economic actors are frequently entangled in, rather than opposed to, organized crime networks. In popular literature, especially when it comes to Russia's transformation, this is often labelled a "mafia state." However, to classify Russia merely through the lens of organized crime is reductive. What emerges instead is a form of state crime that is more structured, instrumental, and geopolitically strategic. CSD has conceptualized such systemic entanglement under the notion of state capture—a process in which private or illicit interests infiltrate, dominate, and repurpose state institutions for their own benefit. In the Russian case, this extends beyond domestic governance: today's use of proxies by states like Russia reflects a deeply institutionalized partnership, in which criminal actors are embedded within broader "statecraft" and hybrid warfare strategies. This integration positions criminal actors as permanent, instrumental assets within state power rather than occasional disposable tools.

Moreover, as seen in the different cases, states deploy a spectrum of actors – private firms, proxies, cyber groups – to achieve deniable, transnational influence. This assemblage of practice – PMCs (Wagner–Russia), ideological militias (Hezbollah–Iran), and state-owned corporations (Hytera–China) – points to differentiated forms of state–crime convergence and to different diapasons of plausible deniability. Understanding these convergences also raises institutional questions: who has or should have the remit to investigate strategic state-sponsored crime? And how? Traditional criminal justice institutions often lack the mandate or jurisdiction to address crimes perpetrated through or by states. In addition, in most cases, they are greatly outmatched in terms of human and other resources compared to the perpetrator states.

New Directions to Understanding Strategic State-Sponsored Criminality

Lavorgna advances the concept of state-cybercrime which encompasses illegal or harmful cyber activities conducted for the benefit of a state. She emphasizes that while cybercrime has been extensively studied in relation to individual or organizational actors, the intersection of cyber affordances and state criminality remains underexplored. Lavorgna proposes a threefold typology of state-cybercrimes: cyberattacks (such as hacking and cyberespionage), cybercontrol (including surveillance and censorship), and cyberdeceit (such as disinformation and propaganda). Each of these categories involves distinct actors and mechanisms, often operating in ways that evade clear legal or normative categorization. Crucially, Lavorgna challenges the tendency to subsume state-cybercrime under traditional definitions of state-organized crime. Unlike conventional organized crime, which typically revolves around profit motives and the social embeddedness of non-state actors, state-cybercrime operates in a fluid digital environment with blurred boundaries between state and non-state actors. In many cases, states outsource operations to proxies – such as hacker collectives or private tech firms—while retaining plausible deniability. This ambiguity complicates both attribution and regulation and highlights the limitations of applying traditional organized crime labels, which may instead serve to justify expansive surveillance regimes.

While classical scholarship tends to treat organized crime as a profit-seeking, anti-state phenomenon, critical research suggests that many authoritarian governments now conscript illicit networks into their core state functions. CSD frames this evolution through its state-capture model, which highlights how political elites, oligarchs, and criminal entrepreneurs "lock in" public institutions and regulatory levers to advance both private enrichment and geopolitical strategy. The Kremlin Playbook series deepens this insight by showing how Russia's intelligence services broker partnerships with private intermediaries and organized-crime groups to evade sanctions, launder capital, and conduct influence operations across Europe and Türkiye. CSD's brief on Illicit Financial Flows in the Balkans and the Black Sea estimates that more than USD 30 billion a year now moves through such hybrid channels, sustaining both corruption at home and Kremlin leverage abroad.

These findings dovetail with Galeotti's analysis of a hybrid Russian governance model, where criminal networks operate as extensions of the security apparatus – an arrangement fostered by Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation. Far from operating independently, these networks now function as extensions of the security apparatus. While Russia does not fit neatly into the model of a "mafia state," the Putin regime has moved toward a hybrid model, where criminal groups are integral to the operational architecture of the state. This institutionalized criminal nexus reflects the pressures of Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation, which have pushed the Kremlin to rely more heavily on illicit networks for economic and strategic resilience. These developments are not unique to Russia. China's use of cyber-mercenaries and Iran's reliance on proxy groups for illicit financing suggest that hybrid state-criminal structures are becoming globally normalized.

One of the most analytically complex challenges is the intersection between state-sponsored crime and transnational organized crime. The emerging but still developing concept of geocriminality offers a lens through which to analyze this transnational entanglement between states and organized crime with a particular focus on geopolitical goals. Geocriminality refers to the systematic instrumentalization of illicit actors and criminal economies by states as tools for influence beyond their borders. Rather than a series of isolated collaborations, this framework captures a strategic and durable alignment between state interests and criminal infrastructures transnationally. From the smuggling corridors of the Caucasus and the Balkans to the dark web marketplaces and encrypted financial platforms of East Asia, states are increasingly cultivating, managing, and directing criminal networks to project power, bypass sanctions, destabilize rivals, and extract value from global systems. As the concept suggests, criminal actors are geographically positioned, politically activated, and infrastructurally embedded within broader geopolitical strategies. These forms of criminal outsourcing complicate attribution and accountability, especially within a global order defined by technological opacity and fragmented legal regimes.

Harm assessment has also been partially addressed. The main problem in understanding the convergence of covert action, organized crime, and irregular warfare, and therefore developing adequate countering mechanisms, as Magda Long argues, is the fragmented and compartmentalized nature of existing analytical and institutional frameworks. Traditional approaches tend to separate national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and criminology into distinct domains, making it difficult to grasp how these elements function together in practice. This siloed thinking obscures the ways in which states deliberately blur the lines between legal and illegal, civilian and military, domestic and international, in order to exploit criminal networks for strategic gain. Moreover, the covert and deniable nature of these operations – often hidden behind proxies, front organizations, and plausible deniability – makes it challenging to trace accountability or fully comprehend the scale of state involvement.

Complementing these theoretical contributions, Shima D. Keene introduces the idea of silent partnerships, referring to covert and functional alliances between states and organized crime or irregular armed actors. Far from being symptomatic of state weakness, these partnerships are deliberate arrangements that serve to outsource violence, maintain control over contested spaces, and evade legal constraints, complicating the traditional understandings of sovereignty and legitimacy. Most importantly, this challenges the conventional state-centric theoretical models of sovereignty and security, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of how power operates in hybrid political orders. In this line of thought, Keene calls for acknowledging the role of non-state actors not just as threats to state authority, but as integral to how many states function and exert control. Her analysis advocates for a strategic-operational intelligence framework that integrates social network analysis, financial intelligence, and understanding of relationship dynamics to identify vulnerabilities within these partnerships. This can directly have a reflection in harm-assessment frameworks in policy and academic analysis on contemporary conflict, governance, and global security that account for the interdependence or "silent partnerships" of state and non-state, legal and illegal spheres.

Across these contributions, several analytical convergences emerge: 1) the strategic use of proxies to sustain deniability; 2) the embedding of criminal infrastructures within state and corporate operations; and 3) the inadequacy of traditional models to account for hybrid, covert, and transnational modalities of power. What emerges is not a breakdown of state authority, but its mutation – a shift toward decentralized, networked, and deniable forms of coercive influence.

Conclusion: An Agenda for New Conceptual Directions

In light of the preceding analysis, it becomes imperative to conceptualize a new framework that captures the specificities of contemporary state criminality as it unfolds within the infrastructure of twenty-first-century hybrid warfare and geopolitical transformation. While numerous concepts have proliferated in recent years, there is a need to identify the critical dimensions any reconceptualization must encompass to better grasp the evolving entanglements of state and criminality.

At the heart of this revised conceptualization lies a recognition of the convergence of state, criminal, and corporate actors within the broader infrastructures of contemporary governance and war. There is a need for a shift in theoretical focus towards the deliberate, coordinated use of criminal practices by states – or with their direct consent, tacit approval, or strategic tolerance – to achieve geopolitical, economic, or security objectives. These practices, tentatively labelled as strategic state-sponsored criminality reflect a systemic logic of governance in which criminality is not a corruption of the state, but a corruption for the state – an extension of its strategic capacities. States deploy a variety of actors – militias, cyber proxies, private companies, smugglers, and money launderers – as modular instruments within transnational assemblages of power projection, especially hybrid warfare.

Crucially, such forms of strategic state-sponsored criminality are characterized by intentionality and coordination. Unlike the "black swan" events often associated with rogue elements or bureaucratic overreach, these practices are not accidental or peripheral, but carefully embedded in state strategies, often operating through formalized relationships with intermediaries and organized networks. This coordination can take the form of integrated logistics between state agencies and transnational smuggling rings, shared technological infrastructures between intelligence services and hacker collectives, or sanctioned laundering operations between shell companies and national banks. In each case, the state leverages criminal methods not as a deviation from governance but as an extension of it, operating within a logic of calculated utility. In the ultimate case of state capture, these features become embedded in the state governance and function automatically, to ensure alignment between state and organized crime goals. As de facto state capture systems are then touted as models of international development, state capture in other countries becomes a vulnerability through which foreign influence is channeled.

Another defining feature is instrumentality. The criminal activities in question are not ends in themselves, as in classical organized crime, where profit is the primary motivator, but are instead means to broader (geo-)political and strategic goals. Whether it is undermining foreign electoral processes through disinformation campaigns, sustaining embargoed war efforts through illicit trade, or extracting advanced technological capabilities through cyber-theft, the criminal acts are subordinated to geopolitical logic. This quality distinguishes strategic state-sponsored criminality from both traditional state repression and criminal enterprises: it is rational, flexible, and goal-oriented, often responding dynamically to shifts in the international system.

Equally important is its transnationality. These operations are rarely only confined within national borders. In fact, one of their most important aspects, that needs to be considered when thinking about harm-assessment, is that they exploit the fragmentation of global legal jurisdictions, the opacity of financial systems, and the decentralized affordances of digital infrastructures. States operating in this mode intentionally exploit these fault lines: offshoring illicit profits through global shell networks, using foreign-based actors to preserve plausible deniability, or carrying out cyberattacks through layered proxy infrastructures that blur attribution. The international scale of these actions not only complicates accountability but challenges the very foundations of sovereignty, legality, and enforcement upon which conventional criminological frameworks are built.

In this sense, another crucial aspect of strategic state-sponsored criminality is that it allows a certain level of plausible deniability: the ability to project force, disrupt rivals, or bypass sanctions while preserving a facade of legality or non-involvement. Whether in the form of Russian cyberattacks conducted by loosely affiliated hacker collectives, Iranian assassinations outsourced to criminal syndicates, or Chinese intellectual property theft carried out via state-affiliated corporate actors, deniability becomes the architecture through which the illicit is operationalized by the state.

This perspective also demands a reconceptualization of the state – not as a bounded legal entity inherently distinct from crime, but as a networked actor capable of managing, instrumentalizing, and strategically directing criminal infrastructures to achieve its political and geopolitical objectives. Rather than merely embedding within illicit networks, such states – often authoritarian or semi-authoritarian – use their institutional apparatuses and resources to exert control over, co-opt, or collaborate with criminal actors. In this configuration, criminal groups can function as extensions of state security services or proxies in the pursuit of state interests. This is governance not solely through the monopoly of violence, but through the calculated orchestration of criminal economies, often masked by plausible deniability and intermediated by semi-legal or extra-legal actors. It challenges the assumption that criminality necessarily undermines state authority, suggesting instead that certain regimes can consolidate power and enhance their strategic reach precisely by fusing state governance with illegality.

Thus, such a conceptual model compels a shift in both criminological and geopolitical analysis. It calls for a cross-disciplinary approach and methodologies that bridge cyber studies, political economy, international relations, and critical legal studies. Cyber studies, for instance, can trace the technical infrastructure and digital tools used in state-sanctioned cyber operations. Political economy helps us follow the financial and logistical chains that enable illicit flows of capital and goods. International relations provide a framework for understanding how these criminal tactics are deployed to project power and destabilize rivals. Critical legal studies can reveal how states manipulate or selectively enforce laws to shield themselves and criminalize others.

Each of these fields offers necessary insights, but only when brought into conversation with one another can we develop a more nuanced understanding of how modern states govern through crime. Similarly, such an agenda would also necessitate rethinking investigative and regulatory institutions: the actors best suited to investigate and counteract this phenomenon – intelligence agencies, cyber units, financial regulators, organized crime agencies, and transnational legal bodies – are usually organized vertically and separately, each focused on a more narrowly defined domain or jurisdiction. The challenge, then, is not merely to theorize this form of criminality but to build new institutional architectures capable of addressing it with the same level of strategic sophistication.

Ultimately, the challenge ahead is twofold: conceptual and political. Conceptually, we must continue moving towards models that do not assume crime as a deviation from state order and recognize how criminality is being reconstituted as a means of statecraft. Politically, we must confront the implications of a world in which the erosion of legality has become a strategic logic at the heart of certain state regimes. It seems that studying these developments is not anymore only a criminological imperative, but more a matter of global democratic security. A future-oriented criminology must therefore be interdisciplinary, institutionally agile, and attuned to the ways in which digital, financial, and logistical infrastructures are reprogrammed by states to serve covert objectives.