Professor Conor O’Reilly

Profile

I am Professor of Transnational Crime and Security and Impact & Engagement Lead at the School of Law.

I joined the School of Law as Associate Professor in 2015. Previously, I held positions at Durham University, the University of Porto and the University of Oxford, the latter as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Criminology. I remain an Affiliate Professor at the School of Criminology, University of Porto and have been a Visiting Scholar at John Jay College for Criminal Justice in New York (2008) and at the Centre for International and Comparative Criminology at the University of Montréal (2019), as well at the Faculty of Law and Criminology, UCLouvain (2026) where I was Global College of Law Fellow. My doctoral research was conducted at Queen’s University Belfast and focused upon the transnational security consultancy industry.

My research is focused upon issues of transnational crime, policing and security, with specific orientation towards pressing global security issues/challenges. This has entailed research on topics including: kidnapping in Mexico and its borderlands; the role of private actors in transnational policing and high policing; policing across the Lusophone community; colonial policing and its transnational legacy; counterinsurgency policing; and, how public policing and state security models are promoted as global brands. These research activities are underpinned by strong international collaborative networks that have facilitated fieldwork in locations including Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, the UK, and the USA. This work has also entailed interdisciplinary links with academic peers from fields including anthropology, geography, history, law and sociology. Across these various research themes, I have organised events, delivered presentations and published a significant body of work, most of which has been widely cited and re-printed. This has included outputs published in English, French, Portuguese and Spanish. Media coverage for my research has included foreign language outlets including Colombian national radio, Mexican and Portuguese written press, as well as the international magazine, New Scientist.

I am currently finalising a monograph entitled Policing Global Risks: The Transnational Security Consultancy Industry (Hart Publishing) that builds upon my longstanding research interest in elite private security provision. Previously published work includes two edited/co-edited compilations on Colonial Policing and the Transnational Legacy: The Global Dynamics of Policing Across the Lusophone Community (Routledge Publishing) and Criminology, Security and Justice: Methodological and Epistemological Issues (Antwerp: Maklu Publishers), multiple peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, such as the British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology, Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology, Crime, Law and Social Change, and, Police Quarterly, as well as various book chapters.

My funded research projects focus upon global challenges and insecurities. As PI of the Newton Fund (Mexico) Project M.A.K.E. ‘Mobile Solutions to the Mexican Kidnapping Epidemic: Beyond Elite Counter-Measures, Towards Citizen-Led Innovation’, I led work to explore the under-researched but pervasive problem of kidnapping in Mexico. From landmark academic gatherings that focussed attention on this illicit practice (https://kidnappingworkshop.net) to co-producing counter-kidnapping tools for ordinary Mexican citizens, our project forged innovative interventions to combat this illicit phenomenon. This research was taken further through joint Leeds-Exeter ESRC Impact Acceleration Account project ‘Amor Secuestado (‘Kidnapped Love’): Transmedia Storytelling Through Telenovelas to Break Taboos and Catalyse Counter-Kidnapping Action in Mexico’ through which we co-designed, co-wrote and co-produced a web-series about kidnapping with grassroots filmmakers from Mexico City. I was later also Co-I on the ESRC Transformative project ‘Data Justice in Mexico’s Multiveillant Society: How Big Data is Reshaping the Struggle for Human Rights and Political Freedoms.’ More recently, I have worked with visual and photographic artists from the Irish borderland region on a new project on ‘Petro-culture & The Informal Fuel Economy’ about fuel smuggling and fuel laundering.

Previous projects have included participation in international and interdisciplinary teams awarded funding from Brazilian and Portuguese research councils to investigate ‘Policing Urban Imaginaries: New Security Formats in Southern Cities’ (FAPESP/FCT) and ‘COPP-LAB – Circulations of Police Officers in Portugal, Lusophone Africa and Brazil’ (FCT). Other funded research has included an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship, and awards/scholarships from, amongst others: the British Council (UK) / FAPESP (Sao Paulo State, Brazil); Santander; FCT (Portugal); and GERN (France).

I have delivered over 70 academic presentations to date (26 as either invited or keynote speaker) in locations including: Belgium, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Mexico, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, and the USA. I have also been a core participant in various international academic associations and research networks, including: the International Association for Portuguese-Speaking Criminology; former National Representative for Portugal for both the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control and also for the GERN Working Group on Colonial Policing; member of the local Organising Committee for the 2015 European Society of Criminology Annual Conference; core-member of University of Leeds-based international network on the Everyday Political Economy of Plural Policing; member of the British Criminology Society; member of the European Society of Criminology; and, International Liaison for the European Society of Criminology Working Group on Policing. At the University of Leeds, I am a member or associate of various cross-departmental research groups, including: the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies (of which I was Director); the Centre for Global Security Challenges; the Ecological Law and Justice Group; the Just Transitions theme of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures; the Leeds Migration Research Network; and, Water@Leeds. I am a member of the International Advisory Board of Theoretical Criminology and have also served as an Editorial Board member for ‘Sistemas de Justiça e Sociedade’ (‘Justice Systems and Society’), Editora da UNICAMP, Brazil, as a Selector for the ‘Security and Intelligence History Series’, Stout Research Centre, Victoria University, New Zealand and on the International Advisory Board of Emerald Studies in Plural Policing.

Responsibilities

• Impact & Engagement Lead

Research interests

With research interests that are focussed upon the transnational dynamics of crime, policing and security, my work is oriented towards employing interdisciplinary approaches towards global security challenges. At present, I have research interests in:

• Transnational crime, policing and security;
• Kidnapping and crimes of (im)mobility;
• Border crime and borderland criminology;
• Pluralization of high policing;
• Branding security;
• Colonial policing;
• Counterinsurgency policing;
• Policing across the Lusophone community

Creative Engagement & Co-Production

A defining characteristic of my work is co-producing innovative mechanisms to address pressing security challenges. In the Newton Fund project M.A.K.E. on kidnapping in Mexico, and the follow-up ESRC Impact Acceleration Award, I co-led extensive work with external collaborators and those directly impacted by kidnapping to co-produce a toolkit of counter-kidnapping resources. Through participatory workshops with victims, relatives and activists, as well as direct collaboration with social justice researchers, A.I. experts, communications specialists, media production experts and grassroots filmmakers, this project co-produced the following range of citizen-led counter-kidnapping resources:

• counter-kidnapping manual in the form of a comic book;
• counter-kidnapping app that functioned as a discrete panic-button, tracker and reporting mechanism;
• videogame to promote peer-to-peer security planning in the face of kidnap risk;
• telenovela web-series that synthesized fieldwork findings into an online series to promote increased awareness about kidnapping and how to combat it;
• web-repository of the latest kidnapping scholarship that brought together academic and non-academic experts from across the globe; and,
• The graphic novel ‘Kintsugi’ which was co-produced with an illustrator and a writer from Tijuana and drew upon a first-hand account of kidnapping to depict a true narrative of resilience and overcoming in confronting this violent crime.

Such collaborative co-creation to confront global security challenges was further extended through the ESRC Transformative project on ‘Data Justice in Mexico’ Multiveillant Society: How Big Data is Reshaping the Struggle for Human Rights and Political Freedom’ where we also co-produced novel digital outputs and online resources. More recently I have been working with visual and photographic artists from the Irish borderland region on a new project on ‘Petro-culture & The Informal Fuel Economy’ to co-create artwork that catalyses community introspection around fuel smuggling and fuel laundering in this area and heightens awareness of its environmental impacts/harms. Artivist works supported through these collaborative efforts have been exhibited in multiple galleries across Ireland and Britain. They have also won prizes for art concerned with the natural environment.

Primary investigator (PI)

• Data Justice in Mexico’s Multiveillant Society: How big data is reshaping the struggle for human rights and political freedoms
• Mobile Solutions to the Mexican Kidnapping Epidemic: Beyond Elite Counter-Measures Towards Citizen-Led Innovation

Student education

I am currently module director for the UG module LAW2095 Transnational and Comparative Criminology and teach on the PGT module LAW5301M Security, Conflict and Justice

 I have previously also taught in the following subject-areas:

• Policing;
• Criminal law;
• Organised crime;
• Globalization & criminology;

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Criminal Justice Studies
• Centre for Global Security Challenges