About Us

Project Summary

The complexity of modern warfare and the global security environment derives in no small part from organised criminal activity that facilitates and sustains the use of violence. The Crime-Conflict Nexus project brings together researchers whose work examines the role of criminality in contemporary conflicts and the ways, means and conditions required to counter its negative effects. To this end, the project scopes the key challenges and threats identified by government, private sector and nongovernmental actors; assembles expertise from the political, military, legal and humanitarian fields; and through individual and collaborative research activities, constructs specific recommendations for policymakers and practitioners.

This is a War Studies Group Research Project, King’s College London.

Project Members

A number of Project members participate anonymously due to fieldwork security concerns.

Jeni Mitchell, Project Leader

Jeni is a researcher and doctoral student within the King’s Department of War Studies. Her dissertation research focuses on civilian victimisation in intrastate warfare and the targeting decisions of non-state armed groups (including criminal groups). It includes an in-depth case study of the victimisation dynamics of the Tajik civil war and their long-term strategic effects on the state and the region, including the impact on Central Asian narco-trafficking. She has also conducted research on jihadist ideology and strategy, ethics and international law in civil wars, and the Balkan wars of the early 1990s.

Jeni is a Research Associate of the Centre of Defence Studies, a member of the Insurgency Research Group, and an online contributor for the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Her recent publications include ‘The Contradictory Effects of Ideology on Jihadist War-Fighting: The Bosnia Precedent’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (September 2008).

Contact: jeni.mitchell@yahoo.co.uk

Contact: tom.hill@kcl.ac.uk

CCN Blog Contributors

Dissydent, Blogger

Dissydent contributes anonymously due to his current work. Dissydent is a journalist based in Russia and contributes to the CCN blog with posts on the crime-conflict nexus in the Caucasus, Russia, and elsewhere in the post-Soviet space.