GI-TOC ¦ The Launch of the Global Organized Crime Index 2025

Global Organized Crime Index 2025: A Crossroads — Criminality Rising While Resilience Erodes

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime’s 2025 Global Organized Crime Index (OC Index) offers the first five‑year view of criminality and state resilience across all 193 UN member states. Building on three editions (2021, 2023, 2025), extensive expert input and thousands of data points, the index demonstrates a worrying trajectory: criminality continues to rise while resilience — the capacity of states and societies to prevent, withstand and recover from organized criminal threats — is faltering. The 2025 edition is notable not only for what it measures (15 criminal markets, five actor types, 12 resilience pillars) but for what the trends reveal: a reorganizing global illicit economy that increasingly exploits technological change, economic pressure and institutional weakness.

Financial and cyber‑dependent crimes lead the expansion

Financial crimes top the 2025 list of pervasive markets and showed the largest increase since 2023. Encompassing fraud, embezzlement, money laundering and other economic offenses, this market is present in every jurisdiction and rose sharply over the last two years. Cyber‑dependent crimes are also expanding rapidly across regions, with increases recorded in 18 of 22 regions. Crucially, both financial and cyber‑dependent markets show only weak correlations with measures of state resilience, indicating existing responses are poorly matched to these threats. The implication is clear: many states’ traditional law‑and‑order toolkits are ill suited to the scale and technical nature of modern economic and cyber exploitation.

Drug markets are reorganizing into a duopoly

The index shows the global drug economy moving toward a duopoly focused on synthetic drugs and cocaine. Cannabis remains the most pervasive drug market overall, but its measured prevalence has declined in some places due to decriminalization trends that shift activity out of penal scopes. Synthetic drugs — and to a lesser extent cocaine — recorded the fastest growth since 2021, reshaping supply chains, production geographies and distribution networks. Heroin registers much lower prevalence by comparison.

Counterfeits as symptom and driver of broader criminality

Trade in counterfeit goods is growing and functions as both an indicator and enabler of wider criminal markets. Counterfeits are correlated with overall criminal market averages, reflecting broader economic pressures — declining purchasing power, policy uncertainty and instability — that push consumers toward cheaper illicit goods and push marginalized people into alternative (often illicit) livelihoods. Counterfeit trade’s diverse product base, including essential medicines, elevates its social and public health harms beyond simple property theft.

Bastian Schwind-Wagner_Follow "The 2025 Global Organized Crime Index shows criminal markets expanding and adapting faster than states can respond, with financial and cyber crimes surging and institutional resilience weakening. Targeted reforms — especially to curb state‑embedded actors and strengthen judicial, financial and community resilience — can meaningfully reduce organized crime’s reach."

State‑embedded actors: the primary obstacle to resilience

Across every edition, actors embedded within state structures — public officials, security personnel and others who use state power for illicit advantage — remain the most pervasive and damaging criminal actor type. The 2025 analysis finds a strong negative relationship between the presence of state‑embedded actors and resilience: high levels of state capture coincide with weaker judicial systems, compromised detention and reduced accountability. Statistical modeling suggests a plausible chain reaction: improving resilience reduces the influence of state‑embedded actors, and reducing those actors in turn lowers criminal market scores. The model estimates that a full‑point improvement in overall resilience corresponds to a significant reduction in state‑embedded actors and, downstream, to measurable declines in criminal markets.

Resilience trends — institutional responses outpace social measures

Among resilience pillars, international cooperation, national policies and law enforcement score highest globally. But nine of the 12 resilience indicators declined between 2023 and 2025, and even the modest increase in international cooperation is the smallest since 2021. Measures tied to social cohesion — prevention, non‑state actors’ capacity, victim support and government transparency — remain weak. The data reveal a common pattern: states rely on institutional or “hard” measures while underinvesting in community‑rooted prevention, social services and independent institutions that reduce vulnerability to criminal recruitment and influence.

Geographic patterns and population exposure

Asia registers the highest continental criminality score, driven by the continent’s size and market diversity; Europe leads global resilience. At the regional level, Central America tops criminality rankings for the third consecutive edition; East Africa is the highest‑scoring African subregion. When countries are plotted on the OC Index vulnerability matrix (criminality versus resilience), the worrying picture becomes stark: about two‑thirds of the global population lives in countries with low resilience, and more than four‑fifths live in countries with high criminality. Since 2021, more countries have shifted into the most dangerous quadrant — high criminality and low resilience.

Forecasting and what can change

For the first time, the index pilots a five‑year forecast (to 2029) for a sample of countries near the “safe zone” (low crime, high resilience). Even among those closest to improvement, several are projected to worsen unless conditions change. Still, the analysis stresses that trajectories are not fixed. Targeted improvements in specific resilience pillars can have outsized effects on reducing state‑embedded actors and thus on criminal markets. Eight of the 12 resilience measures show significant direct influence on the presence of state‑embedded actors; others reinforce the broader resilience environment.

Policy implications: rethink priorities, invest in targeted resilience

The OC Index 2025 points to several policy priorities:

• Rebalance responses: strengthen capabilities to detect, investigate and prosecute financial and cyber‑dependent crimes, while retaining emphasis on cross‑sector criminal investigations that follow illicit finance and networks.
• Address state capture: prioritize judicial independence, detention reforms and anti‑corruption measures that reduce the leverage of state‑embedded actors. Because these actors amplify other criminal markets, effectively limiting their power is a high‑impact intervention.
• Invest in social resilience: expand prevention, victim and witness support, community protection and alternative development programs that reduce recruitment into criminal economies and address root vulnerabilities.
• Enhance cooperation and intelligence sharing: sustain and deepen multilateral operational cooperation and whole‑of‑society approaches that combine law enforcement with financial regulators, civil society, the private sector and international partners.
• Use the index as a policy tool: the OC Index and its interactive platform provide actionable country profiles, market breakdowns and data downloads to inform targeted policy, program design and evaluation.

Regional and operational takeaways from practitioners

Voices from law enforcement and policy makers at the index launch underline the findings’ operational relevance. Former Interpol leadership and senior national officials confirm the need for better data to guide targeted operations, the value of whole‑of‑government strategies and the limits of isolated law enforcement action. Practitioners highlighted the particular need for financial investigations, longer‑term intelligence work (rather than focusing primarily on arrests), and combining repressive tools with development‑oriented alternatives to reduce recruitment and sustain community resilience.

Conclusion: an index as a call to reflection and action

The 2025 OC Index is more than a diagnostic: it is a practical tool for policymakers, civil society, researchers and the private sector. Its five‑year view makes clear that criminal networks are adapting rapidly — often faster than institutional responses — and that economic, technological and political shifts are reshaping the threat landscape. The index underscores a central lesson: weakening state‑embedded actors and strengthening specific resilience pillars can produce systemic reductions in organized crime. Achieving that will require coordinated international cooperation, reoriented national priorities and investment in both institutional and social resilience. The OC Index’s interactive platform (ocindex.net) and downloadable datasets put the evidence at users’ fingertips; the challenge now is to translate evidence into strategy and to act before the most vulnerable populations and institutions are further eroded.

For policymakers and practitioners seeking to use the OC Index: focus analyses on the markets and actor types most relevant to your context, prioritize judicial and financial‑investigation capacity building, and design resilience reforms that reduce state capture while strengthening community protections. The index is a timely call for reflection and action — and a practical starting point for designing responses that match the changing face of organized crime.

Acknowledgement

This summary draws on the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime presentation, which features the presenters.