Some research has been done on the natural history of each kind of organization and the career history of members, but no attempts have been made to generalize more broadly about the rise and decline of criminal organizations. This is significant for two reasons. The first is that the distinction between types of organization may not always be clear. For instance, youth gangs may evolve into more formal organized criminal groups (Weisel 2002); terrorist and criminal groups may share common organizational features, learn from each other and even use the same tactics (Makarenko 2004). The second reason to be interested in generalization is that insights derived from and strategies developed in dealing with one type of criminal organization may be applicable to others. For example, strategies of destabilization employed against Black militant groups in the United States in the 1960s may be relevant to present day counter-terrorist initiatives.

This project aims to transcend academic and law enforcement ‘silos’ by comparing and contrasting three types of illicit organization: youth gangs, conventional organized crime groups and terrorist organizations. It seeks to develop and test a general multilevel theory of illicit organizations. Working initially from a wide-ranging review of the literatures, it explores the nature of these organizations at two levels. The first is the organizational level, involving consideration of the genesis, ascendancy and decline of illicit organizations. The second is the individual level, involving an examination of the recruitment, intensification of commitment (e.g. radicalization in the case of terrorists) and desistance of individual members. The project aims to develop an inventory of propositions on both these levels, as well as cross-level propositions, such as those that would explain the effect of organizational decline on individual recruitment.

• The research will begin with a wide-ranging literature review on each of the three organizational forms. This review takes the form of a mapping of key variables including organizational structure (and/or network morphology), leadership, patterns of recruitment and individual motivations for both joining and committing to the organization. Particular attention will be paid to the life cycle of the organizational types, including factors giving rise to their emergence and decline, both those that relate to the structure and purposes of the organizations themselves and those that relate to outside interventions, that is, the success or otherwise of strategies for their interdiction.
• A propositional inventory will be developed that will cover all aspects of the natural histories of the different types of illicit organizations and the criminal careers of their members, derived from the literature review discussed in the first paragraph. An assessment of potential data sources will also be undertaken of existing data sets in Australia and elsewhere. We will explore the data dimensions for monitoring changes in OMCG and related organized crime activity relative to differences between states. A comparative study of Australian and Hong Kong data sets capable of capturing lethal and/or non-lethal violence involving organized crime groups or members associated with such groups (either as victims and/or offenders) will be developed from existing epidemiological surveillance data.
• The propositional inventory will be supplemented and honed by input from a series of workshops in Canberra attended by academic and law enforcement participants. A Google Groups site dedicated to the project has been established to assist this process. Potential survey, quasi-experimental, observational and simulation research designs will be developed and analytical approaches assessed.
• Articles and working papers will be published on selected aspects of the project, drawing on knowledge gained from the literature review and synthesizing and comparing information across the three types of organization in relation to particular aspects of the project. A book manuscript provisionally entitled Crime, Terrorism and the State is currently under contract with SAGE Publications with a delivery date of 31 January 2010. A feature paper on ‘Triad ‘Dark’ Societies’ in volume 5 of Security Challenges will be published in September 2009. The project team will also contribute to a major new hand-book on organized crime to be published by OUP with a final delivery date of December 2010. 
• In the second half of the project (years 3 and 4) the finalized propositional inventory will be tested on the available Australian police data bases in collaboration with our industry partners, and on other data bases in the public domain.