The author of Le Monde des mafias and La Grande fraude, Jean-François Gayraud is a chief superintendent on France’s national police force. He holds a doctorate in law and is a graduate of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques and of the Institut de Criminologie of Paris.
François Thual is an adviser on strategic affairs to the President of the French Senate and a professor at the Collège Interarmée de Défense (formerly Ecole de Guerre). He has written more than thirty works on geopolitics, some of which have been widely translated.

Since the publication of his now-classic Le Monde des mafias, Jean-François Gayraud has been denouncing the globalisation of crime and its insidious social and economic spread. He now examines the current global situation by contrasting his criminological analyses with studies carried out by an eminent geopolitical expert, because he believes that at the dawn of the twenty-first century it is crucial to break down the barriers between disciplines if we are to grasp crime in all its facets.
“Because we are no longer in a post-war crime novel,” write the authors. “Instead, we have to deal with new configurations that, under the impulse of criminal powers, are challenging the very existence of many States, with some, like Mexico, being obliged to give in. As a result, we must leave behind our romantic vision of crime and criminals. We are now confronted with criminal acts that may even undermine the survival of our democracies. Whole sections of republican sovereignty have been contaminated.”
Why has large-scale international crime grown so greatly? Why has the fight against terrorism and the widespread decline of the State favoured such growth? What are the territorial struggles between organisations? Why are criminal empires formed, threatening States and their equilibrium? How does dirty money act as a drain on capitalism? Why are the elites weakened? The authors examine every facet of the vast criminal chaos that is being constituted under our very eyes.

• Crime has not escaped from the effects of globalisation — with dire results. Two experts examine here the threats to our present and future security.
• Our vision of crime is strongly coloured by the crime fiction of the past as well as by an overly national conception. The stakes, the mechanisms and the dangers are now global. A most original analysis.