Organised crime is not in recess. It is spreading far and wide and, contrary to the image some may have of it, much more harmful than terrorism. Yes, individuals do get arrested, or ‘eliminated’, but criminal organisations remain. They do not disappear. They shift and mutate, but they never lose their criminal character.

Understanding criminal systems requires geographical, historical and political analysis - in much the same way as a military manoeuvre. What would one say of an army launching a campaign against the enemy without first considering its resources, organisation and tactics, or determining its own short-, middle- and long-term strategies? It doesn't take an expert to realize that a campaign lacking such forethought would be doomed to failure. All too often arresting one or more branches of criminal organisations not only does not weaken this criminal sector but, on the contrary, reinforces it, given that police forces often (knowingly or unknowingly) become instrumental in the doings of criminal competitors.

In order to ‘piece together’ – so as to then indeed dismantle/unravel – criminal networks, it is therefore necessary to reconstruct the entire criminal chain. If just one link is missing, there is a risk that the whole of the chain remains invisible, to the advantage of the perpetrators.

The aim of this NATO seminar is to improve the diagnosis so that remedial therapies can be better adapted. It is only by sharing and pooling participants' knowledge, and then building on the information exchanged, that efforts to combat organised crime can gain momentum and take often ‘disjointed’ individual efforts forward, being conscious that the result of confrontation of knowledge's is closer to multiplication than to addition.