Alessandra Dino

The globalization and internationalization of mafia-style organized crime represents a key point for scholars and experts in organized crime. The increase of relations between criminal organizations and terrorist international network, the growth and rise of markets, the simplification of transactions, the opportunity to hide money and financial movements in the international area characterize actual criminal scenario. This paper tries to analyse the effects of globalization on mafia criminal activities and their possible connections with international terrorism. An objective of the present work is to pick out new social actors and technological instruments of transnational and national criminal organizations, new border lines between lawful and unlawful conducts and to describe the shifty “grey area” that links markets and interests apart in the past. The aims of this paper are to explore effects of globalization on criminal organization at the local and international level, to identify if and how tradition is combined with innovation in more structured and traditional criminal organizations, and to investigate the effects of the new legislation against transnational crime on the strategy and structure of mafia organizations. At last, this research also reviews possible tools those scholars and justice operators could use to understand and to decode a phenomenon that appears more evasive and invasive than in the past.