Research on corruption, organised crime, illegal markets, policing and drug policy, and on the informal orders that emerge where formal regulation is weak.

What we study. Since sociology’s founding, the study of crime and deviance has been a key strategy for understanding the nature of society and social life. Crime varies widely across time and space and is deeply intertwined with processes of stratification, political contest and historical development. This cluster addresses crime and its control, with particular expertise in corruption and anti-corruption, organised crime and extra-legal protection, the social order of illegal markets online and offline, drugs and harm-reduction policy, policing and protest policing, terrorism and radicalisation, and the roles of media and gender. Much of the work concerns governance: how order is produced and enforced where formal institutions are absent, contested or captured.

Recent work. Peng Wang holds GRF funding for research on extralegal governance and online gambling in China; his books are Extralegal Governance (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and The Chinese Mafia (Oxford University Press, 2017), and his papers on thugs-for-hire in rural China and on money laundering appeared in the British Journal of Criminology. He is an associate editor of Trends in Organized Crime, an associate member of the Extra-legal Governance Institute at Oxford, and has worked with the UNODC, the ICAC and the IAACA. Karen Joe Laidler leads Pathways to Harm Reduction Drug Policy in Hong Kong and East and Southeast Asia, funded by the Research Impact Fund (R7031-21). Paul Joosse’s work on the evolution of protest policing in a hybrid regime was published in the British Journal of Criminology (2020) and on narratives of rebellion in the European Journal of Criminology (2021). Isak Ladegaard researches illicit online markets and platform governance.

Home of the Centre for Criminology, which works with practitioners and community stakeholders on drug use, sexual violence, financial crime and offender rehabilitation.