Tamara Makarenko

Tamara Makarenko is a security analyst whose 2004 article "The Crime-Terror Continuum" proposed a framework for analysing cooperation and convergence between organised crime and terrorism. The article is influential, but "canonical" is an evaluative description and the framework has limits when it blurs different motives, organisations and evidentiary standards.

The framework

Writing in Global Crime, Makarenko arranged the crime-terror relationship along a continuum with organised crime at one pole and terrorism at the other. Between them she identified graduated forms: alliances, in which criminal and terrorist groups trade services such as smuggling routes, documents, and weapons; operational appropriation, in which each adopts the other's methods, terrorists running criminal enterprises for revenue and criminal groups using terror for political leverage; convergence, in which a single organisation displays both natures and its political and profit motives become indistinguishable; and the "black hole" state, where weak or failed states allow the convergence to capture territory and governance itself. Movement along the continuum is driven by opportunity and pressure: counterterrorist-financing crackdowns push political groups toward crime, while profit can hollow out ideology. The framework's critics argue it can blur motivations that matter operationally, since a profit-seeking network and a political one respond to different pressure; its defenders answer that the blurring is the empirical point.

Significance

The continuum gave analysts a vocabulary for hybrid actors that fit neither a purely criminal nor a purely terrorist category. Researchers may use it to examine cases involving Hezbollah, the FARC or North Korean illicit activity, but each classification depends on case-specific evidence and should not collapse distinct state, organisational and individual conduct. The cited record does not establish that designation authorities formally adopted Makarenko's framework. Its practical value is analytical: it prompts financial-intelligence work within the Underground financial system to test how political violence, profit and organisational adaptation interact, while retaining the legal distinctions required for terrorist-financing designations and malign-finance analysis.

See also

Underground financial system · Malign finance · Terrorist-financing designation (SDGT) · Hezbollah · Lazarus Group · Moisés Naím · Peter Andreas

Sources

• Tamara Makarenko, "The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism", Global Crime 6, no. 1 (2004): 129-145.
• Tamara Makarenko, The Crime-Terror Continuum (PhD thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2005).
• Alex P. Schmid, "Frameworks for Conceptualising Terrorism", Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 2 (2004): 197-221, doi:10.1080/09546550490483134.
• Louise I. Shelley and John T. Picarelli, "Methods and Motives: Exploring Links between Transnational Organized Crime and International Terrorism", Trends in Organized Crime 9, no. 2 (2005): 52-67, doi:10.1007/s12117-005-1024-x.
• Financial Action Task Force, International Standards on Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism and Proliferation, updated February 2025, official framework against which claims about current designation and financial-intelligence practice should be checked.