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Abstract

This dissertation explores economic crime committed during armed conflict and war. It examines fraud, bribery and corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing, intellectual property crime, industrial and economic espionage, market manipulation, tax evasion, and financially motivated cybercrime, serving as a record of economic crimes that date from the American Civil War through to the most recent invasion of Ukraine by Russia. This dissertation addresses gaps in economic criminology research and research by criminologists in armed conflicts and war.
The research has been undertaken using a literature review with an investigative approach that extensively explore themes related to economic crime in war and armed conflict. Academic sources, which do not widely address economic crime in war, have been supplemented with grey literature and media reporting.
The research found a broad range and volume of economic crime, with particularly high incidences of fraud and corruption, often mirroring crimes that occur during peacetime but associated with influxes of funding for the military and reconstruction, as well as significant themes relating to the laundering of conflict resources. Other economic crimes were not recorded so prevalently and often appearing to be concerned with gaining strategic advantage in conflict, rather than motivated for financial gain or lacked a clear linkage to legal definitions of offences.
Many of the economic crimes explored in this dissertation occur similarly at peace but are associated with additional resources, such as those intended for military spending or reconstruction, or by access to new resources, such as the spoils of war. Other crimes appeared to be linked to the circumstances of conflict itself. There were a range of examples where the desperate circumstances of war encourage economic crime in order to survive meagre rations or passage across dangerous territory or to avoid persecution.
This dissertation provides a record of how economic crime occurs in armed conflict and war. It exposes and examines practices, cases, and types of such crime providing a basis for further research and knowledge that could support the development of relevant criminological theory.

Course: Economic Crime - MSc - P3493FTC

Date Deposited: 2024-11-18

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14512.html