How can illicit trade be effectively countered? This volume argues that there is no single best response. Because illicit trade emerges from multiple causes, crosses licit and illicit systems, and adapts to changes in law, enforcement, technology, markets, and political conditions, responses must combine different instruments, actors, and levels of intervention.

The volume examines three broad families of responses. Legal and enforcement responses deter, punish, and disrupt illicit activity through criminal law, international cooperation, sanctions enforcement, and domestic legal frameworks. Technological and forensic responses use tracking and tracing, authentication, digital forensics, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructures to improve visibility, verification, and detection. Governance, policy, and societal responses address the broader conditions that sustain illicit trade through structural public policy, community mobilisation, public awareness, and collaboration between state and non-state actors.

Rather than treating these approaches as alternatives, the volume develops the concept of response configurations, examining how different interventions can be combined, sequenced, and adapted to the mechanisms and contexts they seek to address. It also highlights their limitations and trade-offs, showing that effective responses must be integrated, adaptive, legitimate, and context-sensitive.

Bringing together perspectives from law, criminology, political science, international relations, public policy, economics, sociology, technology studies, and digital forensics, the volume offers a comparative framework for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners working on illicit trade and global governance.

This is the third and final volume of the GLITSS trilogy, a four-year collaborative endeavour involving nearly 300 researchers from 48 countries under the COST Action Globalization, Illicit Trade, Security and Sustainability (GLITSS).

Stefano Caneppele is Full Professor of Criminology at the School of Criminal Justice, University of Lausanne. His research focuses on organized and economic crime, illicit markets, cybercrime, and the evaluation of criminal justice responses. His recent work includes Understanding Crime Trends in a Hybrid Society: The Digital Drift (Springer, 2025), co-authored with Marcelo F. Aebi and Fernando Miró-Llinares, which addresses the challenges of measuring crime trends in an increasingly hybrid physical and digital society. His research also examines organized crime, illicit markets, and crime prevention, with a particular interest in developing evidence-based approaches to measuring emerging forms of crime and assessing responses to them.

Raluca-Ioana Mocanu is Associate Professor in Criminal Law, member of Criminal Law Department, Faculty of Law, University of Bucharest. She delivers a course on Organised Crime Offences at Master Program - Criminal Sciences, and a course on Penitentiary Law at Bachler level. She has nearly 20 years of experience in analysing national legal dispositions (with a comparative perspective) and jurisprudence and to formulate critical opinions regarding the implementation of the law, based on both perspectives -from a theoretical and practical insight. Experience in analysing legal disposition from a broader perspective due to several research stays in foreign universities (University of Fribourg/Switzerland, University of Poitiers/France, Woodrow Wilson Center/Washington DC, USA). She published several books, chapters and articles on national and comparative criminal law regarding organized crime offenses, terrorist offenses and acute problems arising from the implementation of criminal law at the national level. Since October 2022 she was appointed Vice-chair of Cost Action 21133 `Globalization, Illicit Trade, Security and Sustainability`.

George Azzopardi is Associate Professor in Pattern Recognition at the University of Groningen and Honorary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch and the University of Malta. He leads the PRISMA research lab, is Technical Chair within the NWO Open Competition Domain Science-M, and is Working Group Leader within the COST Action GLITSS. His research focuses on brain-inspired pattern recognition methods designed for efficiency and robustness against distribution shifts, with applications across medical, forensic, and personal safety domains. He is the co-founder of the spin-off ForensifAI, Associate Editor-in-Chief of Pattern Recognition, and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Recipient of the Ben Feringa Impact Award (2023) and recognized as an ENLIGHT Ambassador (2024), he has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers.

Francesco Giumelli is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Groningen. He is Chair of the COST Action Globalization, Illicit Trade, Security and Sustainability (GLITSS) and Director of the Development, Security and Justice research theme at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on international sanctions, illicit trade, and the role of public and private actors in security governance. He is the author of International Sanctions (Il Mulino, 2023), The Success of Sanctions (Routledge, 2013), and Coercing, Constraining and Signalling (ECPR Press, 2011), and has published widely on sanctions, security governance, and international relations.