Alberto Aziani

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Sociology and Social Research

The connection between online disinformation and crime is a topic of significant interest. An aspect o f this topic, with strong research potential, is the causal relationship between crimes committed in the real world and disinformation spreading campaigns in the digital world, often on social media platforms. In essence, this research paper focus...

L’assenza dello stato legittimo porta al formarsi di un clima favorevole allo sviluppo di un sottobosco criminale. Il sottobosco si caratterizza per un complesso ecosistema e un’ingiusta piramide ecologica al vertice della quale si trovano i membri dei gruppi di criminalità organizzata di stampo mafioso. Differentemente dagli altri organismi eterot...

There is debate about the convergence of migrant smuggling and transnational trafficking of goods, the threat it poses to society, and its evolution in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, empirical evidence is limited. We tested for convergence using a methodology based on natural language processing. Results show that convergence occurs, b...

Background: Jalal et al. discovered that between 1979 and 2020 total rates and counts of fatal drug overdoses in the United States exhibited exponential growth at a very steady rate even though deaths from individual drugs did not. That is a startling result because it means that the different drugs are in effect "taking turns", with one growing f...

Based on case studies and interviews, it appears that the transnational trafficking of various waste types follows distinct paths. However, this information only provides a partial view of the global waste trafficking network, as it has never been studied by combining all the known illegal flows of different waste types. To address this gap, we ana...

The new forms of slavery materialize in the illegal transfer of people across national borders or within a single country for the purpose of sexual exploitation, forced labor, domestic servitude, organ trafficking, and force marriages. Victims are often subjected to physical and psychological violence and forced to work under extremely precarious c...

Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding discretionary and non-discretionary factors associated with the likelihood of homicides being cleared. Performing Pearson’s χ ² test, logistic regressions, and random forest analyses on all homicide cases that occurred in Italy in 2014, we assess if factors pertaining to the discretionary doma...

This study investigates how an abrupt reduction in policing impacts upon the occurrence of homicides in a violent context in the Global South. The study utilizes a police strike in the Brazilian state of Ceará in summer 2020 as a quasi-natural experiment. Separate SARIMA and Exponential Smoothing models fitted on data on weekly homicide counts from...

Although crime displacement has been extensively investigated, there is a relative dearth of studies on the displacement of transnational crime. Despite the scarcity of literature, it is nevertheless routinely argued in the public sphere that interventions aimed at curtailing crime in a given country may simply displace it somewhere else. In partic...

Chi uccide, e chi viene ucciso, nei mercati illegali? Come e perché si uccide nei mercati illegali? Violenza e mercati illegali: Teorie e analisi della realtà italiana indaga l'emergere della violenza come strumento, e fine, degli individui e dei gruppi che operano nei mercati illegali. La prima parte del libro propone un'articolata riflessione teo...

Chi uccide, e chi viene ucciso, nei mercati illegali? Come e perché si uccide nei mercati illegali? Violenza e mercati illegali: Teorie e analisi della realtà italiana indaga l'emergere della violenza come strumento, e fine, degli individui e dei gruppi che operano nei mercati illegali. La prima parte del libro propone un'articolata riflessione teo...

This chapter examines some of the pressing methodological issues associated with the study of displacement and convergence among transnational crimes flows and identifies several areas for future research. Building upon ideas from prior literature on the advancement of displacement research generally, the discussion focuses on the utility of relyin...

This chapter delineates the concepts of displacement and convergence of transnational crimes. Extant theorizing on crime displacement has typically focused on micro-level dynamics (individual/situational), while macro-level (regional/national/transnational) analyses have thus far developed in a largely fragmented manner via various studies of speci...

Attention to the displacement and convergence of transnational crimes as a result of border security measures has increased substantially since the late 2010s. While the media and politicians have often underlined the potential threat posed by these dynamics, scholars have also begun to investigate these phenomena. Nonetheless, the concepts of disp...

Nel decennio 2010-2020, Uruguay, Canada e Stati Uniti hanno adottato differenti forme di legalizzazione del mercato della cannabis. Alla luce di questo, anche in Italia la legalizzazione della cannabis viene invocata come politica capace di contribuire all’efficientamento del sistema penale, al contrasto al crimine organizzato e, più in generale, a...

The use of a broad conceptualization of human smugglers fosters their stereotypical representation. Moreover, the lack of attention to the heterogeneity of smugglers, to their purposes, methods, and organisational choices, leads to the design of unfair and ineffective migration policies. Relying on previous empirical studies on human smuggling and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new opportunities for organized criminal groups and confronted them with new challenges. Analysis of how these groups have reacted to the pandemic yields better understanding of how they work and enables the devising of more effective counter-strategies. To this end, we identified illustrative cases regarding the p...

Objectives What drives the consumption of illicit cigarettes? While criminology has rarely addressed the divers of the illicit cigarette markets from a theoretical and empirical perspective, studies from other disciplines point to two classes of causes. Some studies stress the impact of cigarette prices and taxes on the market for illicit cigarette...

There is a relative dearth of literature on both the effects of cross-border interdic-tions and the impact of different types of interventions on international drug trafficking. This study identifies the main trafficking routes for cocaine and heroin, along with comparing the disruptive effects induced by targeted and non-coordinated interventions....

This article investigates the patterns of business ownership in Europe, using a unique dataset on the nationality of 28.7 million shareholders of companies registered in 41 European countries. By means of an exploratory multivariate analysis, it tests whether ownership links between different countries are driven exclusively by social and macroecon...

Illicit trafficking constitutes a threat to peace, economic development and social cohesion both in developing countries as well as in the Global North. In view of their danger for people and societies, the Church’s social doctrine is particularly attentive to the issues of human smuggling and trafficking, of drug and firearm trafficking. The Churc...

Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analy...

About one in every two smokers dies from smoking-related causes every year. In response to this, over the past four decades, numerous countries have introduced successful tobacco control policies. Despite this, smoking persists, especially among more disadvantaged social groups. The relatively long history of smoking cessation policies allows for a...

Recent studies exploiting city-level time series have shown that, around the world, several crimes declined after COVID-19 containment policies have been put in place. Using data at the community-level in Chicago, this work aims to advance our understanding on how public interventions affected criminal activities at a finer spatial scale. The analy...

This work investigates whether and how COVID-19 containment policies had an immediate impact on crime trends in Los Angeles. The analysis is conducted using Bayesian structural time-series and focuses on nine crime categories and on the overall crime count, daily monitored from January 1st 2017 to March 28th 2020. We concentrate on two post-interve...

Scholars have investigated the escalation of violence associated with cocaine trafficking. Despite the plethora of literature on the matter, limited attention has been paid to the consequences of instability in the economic value of markets. This study addresses this shortcoming by examining fluctuation of the gross value added of cocaine markets i...

Our understanding of illicit waste trafficking (IWT) is in its embryonic stages; most notably, the transnational nature of this phenomenon has hitherto been neglected in extant empirical research. This study provides the first analysis of the possible coorrelates of transnational IWT at a global level. Through recourse to information extracted from...

Many illicit markets are transnational in nature: illicit products are consumed in a country different from the one in which they were produced. Therefore, reconstructing the trafficking network and estimating the size of cross-border illicit flows are crucial steps to gain better understanding of these crimes and to enforce actions aimed at counte...

The global spread of 2019-nCoV, a new virus belonging to the coronavirus family, forced national and local governments to apply different sets of measures aimed at containing its outbreak. Los Angeles has been one of the first cities in the United States to declare the state of emergency on March 4th, progressively issuing stronger policies involvi...

This study empirically demonstrates how governance-type organized crime groups (OCGs) operate as an enforcer against volume crimes in the communities they control and argues that their ability to mitigate volume crimes forms an integral component of controlling their territory in the long term. This is because the costs incurred from deterring othe...

Organized crime impacts on societies, and it is one of the main threats to global justice. Assessment of the presence and activities of organized crime is therefore crucial for the design of effective policies and actions. Several methodological approaches have been proposed to address the two main challenges implied by this effort: (1) the complex...

This paper introduces and discusses a methodology for estimating the scale of illicit consumption of cigarettes at a national level. After reviewing current data gathering approaches and estimates, the paper delineates a methodology to estimate the consumption of each type of illicit cigarette (i.e., counterfeits, illicit whites, smuggled/trafficke...

Objectives This study tests whether mafias, as archetypical criminal organizations that exert control over local communities, protect their territories against ordinary criminality. Our hypothesis is that mafias have both the incentives and the capacities to supply security governance to specific territories. This is a distinctive feature of mafias...

Illegal enterprise and social embeddedness theories have highlighted the importance of market forces and social factors, respectively, for analyzing organized crime and organized criminal activities. This paper empirically demonstrates the joint explanatory power of these respective theories in the case of the transnational trafficking of cocaine....

This booklet constitutes the first chapter of the ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond Report. It introduces an overview of the transnational trafficking of cigarettes across Europe, Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa. Section 1 describes the two principal forms of cigarette trafficking: i) the one occurring between neighbouring countries and/or...

ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond includes an analysis of the illicit flows of cigarettes moving through EU countries, by also examining the role of and the connections with relevant countries in North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The project identifies and quantifies these flows and highlights the existing connections within political,...

This booklet constitutes the fifth chapter of the ITTP NEXUS in Europe and Beyond Report. It explains the enabling factors driving illicit cigarettes flows: the connections. The connections comprise all the country-level contextual factors and drivers—including key facilitators—of the illicit trade in cigarettes. The term “connections” thus refers...

The chapter describes the main approaches for estimating illicit financial flows (IFFs) in extant literature. In particular, it considers the underlying ideas and the data required for the estimation, along with outlining the manifold limitations of the respective methods. The semantic and conceptual difficulties involved in interpreting IFFs, alli...

Attention to the concept of illicit financial flows (IFFs) is growing in the political debate together with the connected fight against harmful activities as tax avoidance, money laundering, drug trafficking, corruption, and terrorism financing. While the concept was introduced in the context of development economics, it is now used also in the fie...

Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) have received increased attention in light of international corruption scandals, high-profile leaks about extensive tax abuse schemes, and the continued fight against terrorism financing and organised crime. Indeed, reducing IFFs is now a key target of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and other notable institution...

The chapter outlines the flow network approach (FNA), an innovative method for estimating illicit financial flows (IFFs). The FNA is specifically designed to estimate inward and outward IFFs related to the transnational trafficking of illicit goods. FNA also allows for the overall estimation of the gross value added related to transnational traffic...

The chapter provides a critical exploration of the limitations of the proposed flow-network approach, its underlying data, and the assumptions that are involved in its usage. At the same time, it examines at length the calculi required to perform the analysis through recourse to examples and reasoning about the proceeds generated from cocaine traff...

Despite the heterogeneity of the illicit trade in cigarettes within countries, available studies mainly take national markets as their unit of analysis. The innovative contribution of this work is the focus on the phenomenon at the subnational level. Price and non-price factors are examined as determinants of the consumption of illicit cigarettes i...

This study utilizes recent advances in statistical models for social networks to identify the factors shaping heroin trafficking in relation to European countries. First, it estimates the size of the heroin flows among a network of 61 countries, before subsequently using a latent space approach to model the presence of trafficking and the amount of...

Illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) is big business in the United States and creates many harms including reduced tax revenues; damages to the economic interests of legitimate actors; funding for organized-crime and terrorist groups; negative effects of participation in illicit markets, such as violence and incarceration; and reduced effective...

Illicit drugs are trafficked across manifold borders before ultimately reaching consumers. Consequently, interdiction of cross-border drug trafficking forms a critical component of the European Union’s initiative to reduce drug supplies. However, there is contradictory evidence about its effectiveness, which is due, in part, to a paucity of informa...

Scholars analyzed transnational drug flows as a network of economic relationships among countries, and compared the properties of different drug trade networks, including heroin and cocaine (Chandra and Joba 2015; Boivin 2011). Yet, these studies are mainly descriptive in nature and do not consider the size of drug flows. This paper expands on this...

Several scholars recently investigated international drug trafficking using social network analysis (Boivin 2014b; Chandra and Joba 2015). These studies do not quantify the volume of drug flows among countries thus analyzing networks with binary links. This study estimates the size of the heroin flows from and to European countries. Then, it exploi...

The Balkan route, connecting Afghanistan with Western and Central Europe, is one of the world’s most important opiate-trafficking routes. In the past, the EMCDDA and the UNODC invested heavily in the analysis of the supply of opiates to Europe. However, given the opiate trade’s illicit nature, information on these drug flows is scarce and there is...

This study calls for a new direction to be taken in the analysis of, and the fight against, the illicit trade in tobacco products (ITTP) in the European Union (EU). It suggests that the focus should be trained more closely on the reduction of criminal opportunities than on crime control policies. This requires a change of mindset: from the convicti...

This study concerns the crime proofing of the Proposal for the Revision of the Tobacco Products Directive presented in December 2012, and it is an update of a study on the crime proofing of the policy options under consideration of the revision of Directive 2001/37/EC.