On 29 May 2026, a panel of experts presented and discussed the findings of the recently published UNICRI report Dangerous Liaisons: Assessing the Nexus between Terrorism and Criminal Activities in Africa. The webinar brought together practitioners and experts to examine emerging dynamics linking terrorism and illicit activities across parts of West Africa.
The discussion highlighted how terrorist groups increasingly rely on illicit economies not only as sources of funding, but also as mechanisms to strengthen territorial influence, build local support networks, and enhance operational resilience. These include activities such as kidnapping for ransom, extortion, cattle rustling, informal taxation, artisanal mining, and trafficking in goods such as fuel, drugs, and pharmaceuticals.
At the same time, panelists emphasized that these dynamics are deeply embedded in broader structural conditions, including governance gaps, corruption, insecurity, porous borders, and limited socio-economic opportunities. Youth vulnerability and marginalization were identified as key drivers enabling recruitment and participation in both terrorist and criminal economies.
The report builds on UNICRI’s long-standing work on the crime-terror nexus and expands previous analytical frameworks by focusing on the interaction between terrorist actors and criminal markets, rather than solely on the relationship between organized criminal groups and terrorist organizations.
Key takeaways from the discussion:
The nexus between terrorism and criminal activities is multifaceted, adaptive, and highly context-specific, and requires analysis beyond simplified “two-actor” models. Relationships between terrorist and criminal actors exist along a continuum, and the variation is not merely one of degree but also of nature: groups may co-exist, cooperate, converge, or compete for control of territory and resources, as illustrated by the Lakurawa case in Nigeria. The nature of these relationships varies across contexts, with cooperation appearing more deeply entrenched in Benin and coexistence more prevalent in Côte d’Ivoire.
Relationships between terrorist and criminal actors are predominantly opportunistic, transactional, and based on mutual convenience rather than ideology, though they may evolve into cooperation, competition, or partial convergence. The interactions observed between terrorist actors and informal, extra-legal and/or criminal economies are less centered on “spectacular” criminal markets – such as drug trafficking or human trafficking – than is often assumed. While such illicit economies are present in the areas covered by the research, evidence of terrorist involvement in them was limited. Instead, these interactions are more deeply rooted in everyday informal economies tied to mobility and subsistence: cattle trade, fuel smuggling, artisanal mining, and transport.
Terrorist groups rely on informal economies – including trade, transport, smuggling, and local markets – to reinforce their social embeddedness within communities and, in some contexts, to exercise forms of local governance. Through this engagement, they gain access to territory, populations, intelligence, logistics, supply chains, recruitment pools, and local legitimacy.
Where state governance is fragmented, predatory, or absent, terrorist actors can fill the void in ways that earn a degree of local acceptance – offering protection, mediating disputes, guaranteeing access to resources, or acting as preferential buyers in local markets. These functions may be perceived as useful – even legitimate – particularly where state actors are seen as absent or abusive. This allows such groups to present themselves as providers of an alternative political order, complicating efforts to dismantle that role both analytically and operationally.
Informal economies should not be conflated with criminal ones. Participants in these economies may not perceive their activity as a deviation from legal or moral norms. For most, it represents a normalized means of survival and livelihood. Treating all engagement with informal economies as inherently suspect risks criminalizing entire communities, thus reproducing the social and political alienation that terrorist actors seek to exploit for recruitment.
“De-securitizing” the nexus is essential as a purely security-based response risks being counterproductive. When entire sectors of economic subsistence are criminalized, when border communities are treated primarily as suspects, and when informal economies are dismantled without viable alternatives, populations may turn to those who offer protection, credit, access to resources, mobility, and recognition. De-securitization also means better-targeted interventions: improving border governance without limiting it to militarization, regulating artisanal mining without destroying livelihoods, and treating the fight against corruption as a central pillar of counter-terrorism and crime prevention efforts.
The report calls for a reframing of the research question: rather than asking solely whether a link exists between terrorism and organized crime, a more productive analytical question explores what kind of social order emerges when informal economies, terrorist-related violence, corruption, and social marginalization overlap. This approach allows for a more accurate engagement with the empirical complexity of the data, avoiding two major pitfalls: overstating the nexus by presenting it as a structured organizational alliance, and, conversely, underestimating its deep social and economic embeddedness in less visible forms of economic activity, including those below the threshold of more visible criminal economies such as drug trafficking.
