Illicit Outsourcing: Domain, Politics and the Limits of Operational Responses in State–Crime Relationships

States are increasingly outsourcing clandestine and covert tasks to organised criminal actors. This article maps those relationships across four areas – criminals as covert operatives; as professional service providers; crime as a weapon; and crime as covert funding – and develops a state-domain matrix for analysing them. Drawing on lessons from stabilisation and counterinsurgency, Heather Marquette and Matthew Redhead contend that purely operational responses are insufficient without engagement with the political economy that sustains these relationships, and propose dedicated cross-government cells to integrate the response.