ABSTRACT
The analysis of the Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) has led to the fact that police-related topics receive fundamental attention in international studies. This chapter aims to analyse and present the complexity of this debate and nuances, dilemmas and cognitive challenges in the articulation between International Political Economy (IPE) and economic criminology for the comprehension and research of TOC. It will be discussed that the articulation of these two disciplines must be understood in a complex framework where former theoretical and epistemological problems of criminology are overlapped in a changing and dynamic context of the international policy. This complexity refers us to the understanding of TOC in its two dimensions: as a system of control and as a system of economical production. Under this logic, the problem of TOC as “the dark side of globalization” is from a systematic nature that rises as an adaptive response of a political scheme reproduced by the same system that produces and rejects.
