Victoria Greenfield

Affiliate Faculty

Dr. Victoria A. Greenfield is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow with the Policy Institute at KAUST. While at Mason, Greenfield, with co-author Prof. Letizia Paoli, wrote “Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy” (Oxford University Press), which received the 2023 Book Award from the European Society of Criminology. Greenfield, trained as an economist, has specialized in domestic and global security and other international social and economic issues, including transnational crime. She also advises public agencies on strategic planning, organizational design, performance evaluation, and regulatory matters.

In recent years, Greenfield’s publications on crime and policy have explored the harms of illicit drug markets and human trafficking to people, institutions, and the environment, the use of trade sanctions to combat forced labor, the risks of cyberattacks on supply chains, the distribution of revenues from human smuggling, options for controlling the supply of chemical explosive precursors, and means of reducing Afghan opium production.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Greenfield has served as a senior economist and research quality assurance manager at RAND, the Admiral Crowe Chair in the Economics of the Defense Industrial Base at the U.S. Naval Academy, the senior economist for international trade and agriculture at the U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the chief international economist in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, U.S. Department of State, and a principal analyst with the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. She has also lectured at the Leuven Institute for Criminology in Belgium and chaired the National Academies’ committee on reducing the threat of improvised explosive devices.

Selected Publications

Victoria A. Greenfield and Letizia Paoli (2025), “Sustainability as a Benchmark for Assessing Environmental Harms: How Shifting the Lens on Stakeholders and Interests Affects the Results,” in Gruyaert, D. (Ed.), Sustainability, Law and Criminology, Intersentia.

Victoria A. Greenfield, Tobias Sytsma, Amanda Kerrigan, Maya Buenaventura, et al. (2025), Forced Labor in Global Supply Chains: Trade Enforcement Impacts and Opportunities, RAND.

Victoria A. Greenfield and Letizia Paoli (2022), Assessing the Harms of Crime: A New Framework for Criminal Policy, Oxford University Press.

Victoria A. Greenfield, Blas Nunez-Neto, Ian Mitch, Joseph C. Chang, and Etienne Rosas (2019), Human Smuggling and Associated Revenues: What Do or Can We Know About Routes from Central America to the United States? RAND.

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Committee on Reducing the Threat of Improvised Explosive Device Attacks by Restricting Access to Chemical Explosive Precursors (2018), Reducing the Threat of Improvised Explosive Device Attacks by Restricting Access to Explosive Precursor Chemicals, The National Academies Press.

Victoria A. Greenfield, Craig A. Bond, Keith Crane (2017), "A Household Model of Opium-Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan: Results and Lessons for Policymaking," Journal of Policy Modeling, 39(5).

Victoria A. Greenfield, Letizia Paoli, and Andries Zoutendijk (2016), "The Harms of Human Trafficking: Demonstrating the Applicability and Value of a New Framework for Systematic, Empirical Analysis," Global Crime, 17(2).

Letizia Paoli, Victoria A. Greenfield, and Peter Reuter (2009), The World Heroin Market: Can Supply Be Cut? Oxford University Press.