Minerva-funded researchers Mariya Omelicheva and Lawrence Markowitz's Owl in the Olive Tree blog post on "Beneath the "Crime-Terror Nexus": Local Power Struggles, Competition over Resources, and Corrupt State". The post-Cold War era has been marked by policy and academic debates about the cooperative links between criminal and terrorist actors. According to the prevailing view, the dissolution of the Soviet Union resulted in the contraction of traditional revenue streams of terrorist groups, (including state-sponsorship), drawing terrorist organizations into a range of illicit activities to raise funds for their operations. Concurrently, advances in information and communication technologies and the ease and speed of cross-border movement have transformed the nature of organized crime. These changes were believed to have provided opportunities for criminal and terrorist groups’ collaboration.
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