Welcome back to bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today we're talking about the intersection of terrorism, crime, and corruption.

My guest is the founder and director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.

She's a professor at George Mason University, an author, and an expert on international crime.

Today we're discussing her most recent book, Dirty Entanglements, Corruption, Crime, and Terrorism.

Louise Shelley, thank you for joining me.

My pleasure to be with you.

So why don't you just give us an overview of the premise of your book?

It's an excellent book, very accessible in spite of the daunting subject matter.

But you connect the dots between crimes that we usually think of in isolation.

I think that far too often we think of

crime and terrorism as separate phenomena, and they aren't anymore. 30 years ago, when there was a

lot of state support for terrorism, then the terrorists could function on their own apart

from criminals.

But nowadays, there are very close links, and just as all transnational criminals and organized crime have to use corruption to survive, the same thing goes for terrorists.

So we've even had the United Nations recognizing the large number of

types of crime and illicit trade that are used to support terrorism. So this is a fundamental

change and it also reflects the fact that terrorists in some ways are less ideological and more like

criminal business people and that criminals will collaborate often with terrorists despite

the fact that they may be undermining the state.

If we look to your chapter two, corruption, an incubator of organized crime and

terrorism, that was an interesting way of framing that. Corruption is an incubator. Can you help us

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