Para-crime: Notes Towards A ‘Grey Criminology’

Although criminology has long debated the so-called ‘crime drop’, the shifting nature of criminality complicates any clear-cut assessment. While some offences have decreased, this is not necessarily due to moral reform or growing securitisation but rather to transformations in crime modalities. The illicit does not simply retreat or relocate, we argue; nowadays, it increasingly adapts, embeds, and exploits the very systems designed to structure and secure social life. This article thereby explores how contemporary crime operates in grey zone, para-criminal modes—that is, as parasitically entangled within the very flows of technology, trade, finance and governance that define late modernity. Indeed, instead of existing in opposition to legal orders, illegality thrives within them. It flourishes within their infrastructural vulnerabilities.