Criminal and terrorist organisations are increasingly turning to white collar crime such as fraud, e-crime, bribery, data and identity theft, in addition to more violent activities involving kidnap and ransom, narcotics and arms trafficking, to fund their activities and, in some cases pursue their cause. The choice of victims is global and indiscriminate. The modus operandi is continually mutating and increasing in sophistication; taking advantage of weaknesses in the system whether they be technological, legal or political. Countering these sources of threat finance is a shared challenge for governments, the military, NGOs, financial institutions and other businesses that may be targeted. Shima Keene's Threat Finance offers new thinking to equip any organisation regardless of sector and geographical location, with the knowledge and tools to deploy effective counter measures to tackle the threat. To that end, she brings together a wide variety of perspectives - cultural, legal, economic and technological - to explain the sources, mechanisms and key intervention methodologies. The current environment continues to favour the criminal and the terrorist. Threat Finance is an essential read for fraud and security practitioners, financial regulators, policy-makers, intelligence officials, judges and barristers, law enforcement officers, and researchers in this field. Dr Keene offers an antidote to the lack of good, applied, research; shortcomings in in-house financial and forensic expertise; misdirected financial compliance schemes; legal and judicial idiosyncrasies; unhelpful organisation structures and poor communication. She argues convincingly for a coherent, aggressive, informed and cross-disciplinary approach to an ever changing and rapidly growing threat.

The relationship between corruption and stability is complex. What is clear is that corruption increases the level of instability and the risk of conflict by undermining the legitimacy and credibility of state institutions. For peacekeeping and state-building interventions to be effective, careful consideration must be given as to the reason the problem occurs, and to its broader impact, as well as ways to manage it. In this Letort Paper, British academic and practitioner Dr. Shima Keene provides a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between corruption, legitimacy, and stability in fragile states, and explores what must be done by the U.S. Army to counter these issues that directly impact its operational effectiveness.

The use of drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, has increased exponentially in the last 10 years, and this trend is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. But with this increased use has come increased controversy, in particular closer scrutiny of the legal and ethical dimensions of the use of armed drones. In this monograph, British academic and practitioner Dr. Shima Keene provides a comprehensive assessment of the lethal use of drone technologies, measured in terms of their legality, morality, and overall effectiveness in the fight against terrorism and counterinsurgency operations. Dr. Keene is a subject matter expert in the field of asymmetric warfare and counterterrorism, and a former Director of the Security Technology Short Course at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, where she conducted research into both technical and ethical aspects of the deployment of UAV technologies. In her monograph, she explores the legal and ethical bases...

The U.S. Army and the British Army are undergoing similar processes of rebalancing between regular and reserve personnel. The British armed forces are currently at a more advanced stage of this change than the United States, and consequently there are useful lessons to be drawn from their experience to date. This is particularly the case in a time of growing defense austerity; in addition to their smaller scale, the United Kingdom's (UK) armed forces have great familiarity with undertaking missions and maintaining close to full-spectrum capability while subject to severe and apparently insurmountable resource constraints. Studying how this is made possible may also provide valuable pointers for a U.S. defense force in an era of sequestration and budget cuts.

It is a well established axiom that attempting to defeat an insurgency or a terrorist organization headon is merely treating the symptoms of a problem. For long-term success, the campaign must also address the root causes of the insecurity that spawned conflict in the first place. In this monograph, British academic and practitioner Dr. Shima Keene describes a number of ways in which financial intelligence can be leveraged not only to disrupt adversary activities, but also to provide indicators and warnings of future actions and, ultimately, to address underlying insecurities. Dr. Keene was previously both a banker and a British Army reservist. In this monograph, she uses her expertise as a threat finance specialist to outline specific areas where financial intelligence analysis techniques, which are common in the private sector, can be applied to combating insurgency, terrorism, and other hard security threats.