The Unlawful Society

Global Crime and Security in a Complex World

Paul Battersby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137282965
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the dynamics of law-making in a world where the pace of technological change is outstripping our capacity to capture new forms of transnational crime, this book uses the innovative concept of unlawfulness to examine the crimes of the global overworld, forming a unique analysis of global order in the twenty-first century.

1

Criminal Measures: Counting the Costs of Transnational Crime

How substantial are criminal or illicit transactions relative to licit economic exchange? The globalization of crime or “deviant globalization” is, from one perspective, merely globalization unrestrained by law or principle, save for the necessary “black protocols” that facilitate criminal organization and exchange (Deibert, 2013). Indeed, the extension of criminal enterprises across time and space is but one more manifestation of the fluidity or “liquidity” and “compression” that are engendered by, and accelerate, globalization (Harvey, 1991; Baumann, 2000). Parallel to the diversification of corporations in the licit economy, criminal entities are “networked,” “diversified,” strategically managed and “vertically” integrated to achieve “upstream” and “downstream” business “synergies” (Naim, 2005; UNODC, 2007). Yet, the value of transnational criminal activity, such as can be gleaned from publicly available sources, is only a fraction of total global economic activity or gross global product.

Strong objections are often raised against the “securitization” of crime and the claim that transnational criminal networks are “winning” a global crime war (Andreas, 2011). Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann highlight the growth of security as a domain of expert knowledge, encompassing both military and policing affairs, and the consequential growth in the number of experts and “expert systems” with a vested political or commercial interest in threat inflation (Giddens, 1990; Andreas and Nadelmann, 2006). Viewed systemically then, “securitization” perpetuates a global “state of emergency” that serves to entrench established power structures and negates inquiry into the sociological and political dimensions of crime (Duffield, 2007, p. 33). Clearly, the nature and extent of criminal activity is changing, but the dominant transnational organized crime narrative focuses attention on conventional “identikit” profiles of the protagonists of crime, with little or no consideration given to their social context. To achieve a genuinely global perspective in crime, therefore, conventional and unconventional profiles of crime need to be assembled, juxtaposed and analysed, and criminal relativities measured, not to exonerate the guilty but to recalibrate the scales of criminality.

Securitizing transnational crime

Security doctrines are first and foremost doctrines designed for the control of people as either the referents or the enemies of security. Pre-emptive or “prudential” intervention to correct or control deviance in the international systems is both sanctioned and “normalized” through two non-traditional security doctrines framed in response to the emergent complexities of the post-Cold War era. The first doctrine, “human security,” prioritizes the well-being of peoples and communities above the security of states and frames human security as a development-oriented security domain addressing the interrelationships between poverty, human rights, public health, education, political participation and peace (UNDP, 1994). Marking substantial refinement of the concept, the United Nations (UN) Commission on Human Security declared in its 2003 report, Human Security Now, “the international community urgently needs a new paradigm of security,” not least because the state, for so long the “fundamental purveyor of security,” cannot be relied upon to guarantee the welfare of its people (UNCHS, 2003, p. 2). Defining security as “enablement,” the Commission revisits the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to objectively state a connection between respect for the rule of law, justice and peace. Reprising the “ethical realism” espoused by US presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, the report re-represents respect for rights to self-determination and to freedom from persecution, famine and disease as the essential building blocks for an ordered new post-Cold War world (UNCHS, 2003; Lieven and Hulsman, 2006).

As a comprehensive framework for analysis and as an organizing principle for the mobilization of institutional resources, human security is a ground-breaking idea that captures the complexities of peace and security in the contemporary world. But like all ideas it can be subverted, not least because any human weakness and any systemic vulnerability could be interpreted as a threat to the organic security of global society and thus rendered “actionable.” Human security is a concept not only conceived in opposition to materialist or realist notions of state-centric security but also to broaden the scope for state action to address a longer menu of security “problems” (Nuruzzaman, 2006, p. 300). The idea can be recruited to serve traditionalist ends, whether framed as militarized security or securitized crime, with the result that the repertoire of governance is culled of creative options to law enforcement and the use of force.

The second doctrine, emphasizing the dangers of “terror and transnational organized crime,” gained ascendancy in Washington post-9/11. Security thinking in the US and among close US allies veered towards pre-emptive “threat disablement,” distorting the problem-solving logic of human security to seek to control political outcomes in parts of the world deemed critical to US national security through strategic interventions (Boot and Kirkpatrick, 2004; Kagan, 2008; Rieff et al., 2008). In the logic of this terror and transnational organized crime imperative, anti-state terrorism and transnational crime are conceived as threats to US interests and to global order. Despite the discrediting failures of interventions in Afghanistan (2001–2014) and Iraq (2003–2011), residues of this interventionism – labelled, for better or worse, as “neo-conservatism – continue to inform conceptions of national and global security (Fukuyama, 2007).

Crime and terrorism thus constitute a new raison d’être for state interventions. Extensive inventories of political risk detail the structural causes of state failure and global insecurity. Replete with models outlining the conditions under which societies become destabilized, these inventories offer logic and legitimacy to “corrective” prescriptions including pre-emptive actions by interested parties (Farah, 2013). Much effort was invested in the study of state failure in the 1990s, for example, by the State Failure Task Force (also Political Instability Task Force), funded initially by the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Directorate of Intelligence during the Clinton Administration. In quantifying political risk, the Task Force matricized a long schedule of “risk factors” that included, inter alia, widespread poverty, extreme inequality, lack of economic opportunity and the political and economic marginalization by the state of political groups claiming distinctive identities and rights. A “global model” is used to profile states and security risks according to regime type, with “democracies” identified as security enhancers. Authoritarian states with brittle regimes, weak economies and unresolved internal political tensions were placed high on the “at risk” list, with most located in the “badlands” of the developing and underdeveloped world, especially the underdeveloped Muslim world (Esty et al., 1998). The Institute for Economics and Peace adds to the wealth of security metrics with its Global Peace Index, offering a further refinement of the risk management approach to security. Adding to the weight of evidence in favour of liberal governance, the Index identifies 23 state-level factors or indicators of risk to global peace (IEF, n/d). Of these only four refer directly to crime: imprisonment rates, murder rates, criminal violence, perceptions of criminality and corruption. Indeed, crime ranks lower, relative to political legitimacy, economic opportunity or freedom, while the entire transnational dimension to crime is left to the reader to infer.

The compilation of compelling “big data” offers no guarantee that the data is either collected or interpreted without bias, especially where fiscal and political pressures are at play (Kavalski, 2008; Silver, 2012; Richards and King, 2013). Neither can we be assured that insecurities are likely to be addressed holistically where conceptions of the security challenges faced are narrow and bureaucratically partisan, or where the requisite security responses are limited to police surveillance, law enforcement and the militarization of diplomacy.

Parallel worlds

Official crime narratives detail an alarming global crime surge over the first decade of the twenty-first century. Transnational financial crime is, according to the US State Department, a serious threat to US security and global order. In its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INLEA) estimated a ten-fold increase in transnational financial crimes – ranging from money laundering to identity fraud – and warned of the new possibilities and vulnerabilities generated by the exponential growth of Internet traffic. The main security challenge identified, predictably, is “terror finance,” which brackets terrorist organizations with organized crime and attaches greatest significance to the illicit activities of traffickers and terrorists (INLEA, 2008; US DoT, 2011; INLEA 2011, pp. 3–4). The growth and sophistication of financial crimes is a matter of concern for the risks posed to individuals and to the global financial system as a whole. There is, however, a conceptual gap between financial crimes detailed in the INCSR and the more complex issue of “shadow economies” that fall outside the remit of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Financial Action Taskforce and the global terror finance regime (Schneider et al., 2010, p. 4). The aggregate annual value of global “shadow” economic activity, encompassing both illegal and legal but also unconscionable economic behaviours, could be as high as US$15 trillion, of which as much as US$11 trillion is attributable to tax evasion and other forms of financial obligation avoidance – and much of this to the unlawfulness of otherwise lawful economic actors. The failure to abide by or to ensure payment of nationally legislated minimum wage rates could thus be conceived as a form of transnational financial crime and one that would draw in many footloose transnational corporations, in the textile, clothing and footwear industries especially (Schneider et al., 2010, p. 5; Tax Justice Network, 2011). Conventional money laundering, or illicit finance, conservatively estimated to be the equivalent of four to five per cent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – approximately US$4 trillion – accounts for much of the remainder. But then what, under the expanded definition of financial crime offered here, is the absolute value of “stolen” money washing through the global financial system? This is to say nothing of the annual underpayment of overseas development assistance obligations by developed country governments spanning more than four decades (see Chapter 5).

Allowing for the impossibility of gathering reliable and comprehensive data on all forms of criminal finance, the aggregate value of transnational crime involving conventionally defined criminal entities is comparatively small, surprisingly, when considered in the context of a global economy worth US$83 trillion Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) in 2012, and a global financial system in which tens of trillions of dollars are traded lawfully each day. Valuations of financial crime are all too easily exaggerated. In one example, counterfeit bonds found in a Zurich bank vault in 2012 were claimed by police investigators to have a face value of US$6 trillion. Allegedly controlled by an Italian syndicate but attributed to an “international network” of criminals, the fakes were held up as an example of the increasing scale of criminal efforts to subvert the global financial system. As a single instance of attempted fraud, this appears a globally significant sum in a global bond market worth US$96 trillion (c. 2010–2011), and there were suggestions of a link to international terrorism, but it was, surprisingly, downplayed by US security officials as a wishful, amateurish and easily detectable “routine scam” – akin to running-off reams of bond certificates from a home office bubble-jet printer (Accenture, 2012, p. 3; Donadio, 2012). There is a very wide gap between monetary aspiration and market value. Exaggerations and misrepresentations contribute to an image of a world economy awash with illicit capital and in danger of falling into the clutches of organized crime syndicates. Yet, expansion in the illicit global economy might well be interpreted as an inevitable but relatively minor corollary of the rapid expansion of the licit global economy that has more than doubled in GDP terms since 1990.

It is possible both to overstate and to underestimate the relative ­significance of all forms of transnational criminal activity. The global trade in narcotics doubled in value in the first decade of this century, inflicting misery upon millions of addicts and their immediate families but, as noted, the global economy has also grown rapidly. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) statistics indicate a “stable” prevalence of illicit drug use and “problem” drug use at, respectively, 5 per cent and 0.3 per cent of the global population aged 15 to 64. The actual number of persons addicted to or experimenting with illicit psychoactive substances rose from 180 million to 210 million, an increase of 30 million, but roughly proportionate to the growth of the world’s population from six to seven billion over the same period (UNODC, 2011, p. 22; 2013a, p. 1). UNODC reports that the bulk of global illicit trade earnings (excluding investment returns) is derived from trafficking in cocaine (US$72 billion, 2008) and heroin (US$55 billion). Criminalized Amphetamine-Type Stimulants (ATS) are, however, today’s designer drugs of choice (noting that there are many legal methamphetamine and amphetamine drugs used to treat respiratory and neurological conditions including depression; Benzedrine and Dexedrine for example). Illicit ATS manufacture and use is in a major growth phase and – because of their disaggregated production and distribution and the seemingly limitless chemical combinations available to synthesise new varieties of illegal stimulant – represents a more insidious global challenge (UNODC, 2013b, pp. 49–52). Mirroring patterns of transnational exchange in the licit global economy, nearly two-thirds of the “street value” or “surplus value” of exported narcotics is realized at point of sale in the US and European markets (UNODC, 2010, pp. 16–17). The gross yield from narcotics trafficking is of course much higher, incorporating returns from the investment of “drug money” in illicit and licit enterprise. Gross harm is likewise higher than monetized returns on narcotics transactions, and the balance of harm is likewise unevenly distributed across the globe.

Governments give character to the claimed transnational “threat” posed by narcotics trafficking and money laundering by associating crimes with established stereotypes: mafia dons, terrorists (read Islamists), “drug barons.” In some instances, parallels are drawn for rhetorical effect between crime economies and states, to imply the solidification of criminal entities into a singular geostrategi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Criminal Measures: Counting the Costs of Transnational Crime
• 2 Converging in the Shadows: Complex Crime, Complex Security
• 3 The Globalization of State Crime
• 4 Good Corp, Bad Corp: Market Crimes and Systemic Risk
• 5 Invidious Choices: Humanitarianism on the Edge
• 6 Amorality, Complexity and Cosmopolitan Code
• Bibliography
• Index