| By Dibya Sarkar
Researchers at two universities have been awarded more than $950,000 from the Defense Department to examine the connections between organized crime and terrorism in Central Asia, South Caucasus and Russia.
Under the three-year project, the University of Kansas and Rowan University will also look at how such connections are formed and transformed as well as how governments and international organizations can track, prevent and eradicate such activities, according to a May 28 press release from KU.
The strength of terrorist groups such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Islamic Jihad Union and al-Qaeda have been linked to drug trafficking in Eurasia. Illicit sales of weapons and human trafficking, whether labor or sexual exploitation, are also common.
"Central Asia is a hotspot for human trafficking and drug trafficking. A lot of the trafficking that is happening is for Russian and European consumption, while the Central Asian states are where most of the traffickers and trafficking victims originate," said the study's principal investigator, Mariya Omelicheva, who added that terrorist groups have either engaged in criminal activities or formed partnerships with criminal organizations.
Omelicheva, who is director of the KU Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and an associate political science professor, leads the research team that also includes Stephen Egbert, a KU geography professor, and Lawrence Markowitz, a political science associate professor at Rowan.
The project will use geographic information system tools to "map and model the nexus between trafficking and terrorism in nine Eurasian countries," the release added. It will use geographical coordinates of major terrorist incidents, geo-reference drug seizures and assemble human trafficking data from various reputable databases.
The release said that figuring out whether acts of violence are terrorism or organized crime is important because solutions need to match the nature of the problem in certain areas. Some bombings have been attributed to terrorism when they were part of a drug war, the release added.
By better understanding the connection between terrorism and trafficking, Omelicheva said the U.S. military can target areas so it can disrupt activity.
"Trafficking and terrorism adversely impact governance, security, stability and development in this region and beyond," she said in the release. "They create conditions precipitous for the rise of crime, violence and extremism in states that are U.S. partners and allies."
Research funding is being provided by DoD's Minerva Research Initiative, which seeks to build a deeper understanding of the social, cultural and political dynamics that shape regions of strategic interest, according to the initiative's website.
