Editorial: Islands of Organised Crime: Spatiality, Mobility and Confinement

This special issue aims to explore organised crime and counter-crime responses through the lens of spatiality. We focus on islands—i.e., bounded spaces that are territorially discontinuous vis-a-vis mainland—but we reject geographic determinism and adopt John Agnew’s definition of spatiality as ‘how space is represented as having effects’ (1994: 55). Islands are commonly associated with the idea of laboratory and self-contained experimentation: this happens in very diverse disciplinary fields—ranging from biology to anthropology, and even archaeology. How their peculiar spatial features impact on social and political configurations and practices, however, is a less explored subject. Yet, there is no lack of insightful evidence: islands are historically used to pursue strategies of displacement, containment and seclusion and colonisation (e.g., penal colonies, detention camps, military facilities). Insular spaces are often built as zones of exception and extraterritoriality (Mountz, 2015: 641-642). The present collection of articles thus seeks to investigate whether there is anything distinctive about organised crime dynamics in islands: what role do islands play in today’s maps of transnational organised crime?