School of English receives grant worth £450,000 to investigate organised crime

Project funded by Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to examine the root causes of a 'crime-terror nexus' in Lebanon that has global ramifications.

Professor Caroline Rooney will join Dr Raphaël Lefèvre (Oxford University) on a three-year project examining the impact of Transnational Organised Crime (TNOC) emanating from deprived districts in Tripoli, Lebanon(pictured above).

The grant, awarded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), will look at how three neighbourhoods in this part of the country have become a haven for TNOC and to uncover the conditions that have caused this to create terror-crime interactions.

The project is entitled ‘Islamo-Gangsterism: An Exploratory Study of the Embeddedness of the “Crime-Terror Nexus” in Three Neighbourhoods of Tripoli (Lebanon)’ and will begin in January 2019.

Professor Rooney was recently shortlisted for The Health Humanities Medal for Best International Research Award by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Text by Dan Worth
Image: Tripoli in Lebanon, Dr Ghazi Omar Tadmouri