A the world hopes for peace in Ukraine, one Europol analyst tells me of a seemingly esoteric concern about what it might entail. For years, he has tracked the flow of Chinese counterfeit goods into Europe – some seemingly harmless, such as fake designer bags or jeans; others including cheap car tyres that are likely to shred at speed or dubious cosmetics containing potentially dangerous ingredients.

“Until 2022, the Russian and Ukrainian gangs had no trouble working together and the counterfeit goods would pour through by the container-load,” he says. The invasion shattered these partnerships and, for a while, the flow faltered. His concern is that peace would see alliances – trading in everything from Afghan heroin to stolen cars – reforged. “There’s just too much money to be made,” my contact concludes.

It is a useful reminder that almost every political twist and turn – war, peace, a ban or a liberalisation – creates opportunities for those who are engaged in organised crime. Ban refrigerators that use polluting CFCS and you’ll create a market for mafia front companies claiming to dispose of them in an eco-friendly way at a fair price, then dumping them at sea or at a landfill site. This is exactly what happened when the chemicals were proscribed by the 1987 Montréal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

Planning to raise taxes on cigarettes? You’re also helping to make profit margins on counterfeit or untaxed packs all the more substantial. This “buttlegging” was one of the mainstays of the rebel Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine after 2014, where factories were turning out thousands of cigarettes an hour that were distributed worldwide.

Gangsters are the truest capitalists and internationalists, and take fullest advantage of the fact that markets are global but laws are normally corralled behind national borders. This is also because organised crime isn’t a hostile and separate “other”, as we might like to believe. It’s not all about tattooed hard men with thick foreign accents, conspiring menacingly in the shadows. It has become embedded even in what might look like the most upstanding societies.

Surveys such as Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index tend to split the world roughly between honest, wealthy countries and corrupt, impoverished ones. But ask yourself: where does the bribe money end up? Banks in Swaziland rather than Switzerland, property in Laos instead of Luxembourg? Hardly. Corruption is actually just another mechanism draining assets, even criminal ones, from the Global South northwards – just so long as the money has been laundered enough that we can faithfully ignore its provenance.

On some level we all understand that our financial systems float on oceans of dirty money. But we too rarely appreciate just how much the other foundations of our world are built on crime – not the old sins of empire and slavery that gather attention but modern ones that underpin our daily lives. Think of the trafficked labourers mining the minerals that go into our pockets as mobile phones (stereotypes notwithstanding, most victims are used for labour, not sexual exploitation, and remain within their home countries). Or those who are picking the crops that end up in our supermarkets.

Sometimes those foundations are not only metaphorical but also literal. Construction globally uses more than 40 billion tonnes of sand and gravel every year and its extraction is a €387bn industry. The result is the emergence of so-called sand mafias. In China, criminals use GPS jammers to mask boats that suck up thousands of tonnes of what local builders have come to call “soft gold” from river beds. In India, beaches are disappearing, river and marine ecosystems are being disrupted and even coastal currents are being redirected.

I am not saying that we should learn to love our gangsters or stop trying to police and prosecute them. They exploit the weak, corrupt the strong, defraud the state and undermine society. They even get in the way of movie night: almost a quarter of global internet bandwidth is being taken up by the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials – which means that you can blame the criminals for the time that your film takes buffering.

It does, however, indicate that we need to be more thoughtful when it comes to how we address the challenge. Treating crime as an ethical failure overlooks how mafias colonise the no-man’s land between the moral economies of state and society. In other words, when we ban things, unless society is on board with that, we create new markets for the criminals.

Indeed, as the Americans found during Prohibition in the 1920s and the Soviets when they launched a heavy-handed anti-alcohol campaign in the 1980s, the risk is that people come to see the criminals not as oppressors but as allies. After all, crime can sometimes be a liberating force.

The survival of the Lithuanian language is arguably thanks to gangsters who smuggled in books and newspapers printed in neighbouring Prussia in the 19th century, when Tsarist Russian censors were trying to erase it. Today, the illegal “frog markets” of North Korea – named after the way that traders leap from their positions when the police arrive – offer a taste of forbidden freedoms, from USB sticks loaded with K-pop tracks to South Korean Choco Pie cakes, all banned since 2014.

In the most controlled societies, for better or worse, a little criminality can also offer a pressure valve. In the famously law-abiding 1970s Japan, the Sukeban, gangs of delinquent teenage girls in school uniforms and surgical masks, wielded chains and razor blades as they shoplifted, brawled and generally misbehaved as though they were in a cross between Pacific Rim and a particularly boisterous St Trinian’s story. They weren’t only criminals – they also challenged hidebound notions of quiet and deferential womanhood. In other words, crime doesn’t just pay; it also defines the jagged margins of our societies, the clashes between old and new values. Understanding it is crucial to understanding the world.

Today, during unprecedented economic and technological change, when existing social and political orthodoxies crumble, we’re living in a gangster’s paradise.