CRIME & GLOBALISATION

CRIME AND GLOBALISATION

In recent years, many have sounded the alarm on the "virulent synergy between globalisation and
organised crime", [1] as the United Nations Development Programme described the joint venture
between the two in its Human Development Report
(HDR) of 1999 that was devoted to globalisation. What is commonly described as 'transnational organised crime' is increasingly
mentioned as one of the main negative side effects of globalisation.

According to the HDR organised crime is a threat for the globalisation process. "At the root of all this
is the growing influence of organized crime, estimated to gross $1.5 trillion a year, rivalling multinational corporations as
an economic power. Global crime groups have the power to criminalize politics, business and the police, developing efficient
networks, extending their reach deep and wide." [...] "All have operations extending beyond national borders, and they
are now developing strategic alliances linked in a global network, reaping the benefits of globalization." name=2b>[2]

Crime syndicates prefer globalisation, for it creates "new and exciting opportunities, and among the
most enterprising and imaginists are the world’s criminals." According to the HDR crime groups are able to generate
enormous amounts of money: "The illegal drug trade in 1995 was estimated at $400 billion, about 8% of world trade, more
than the share of iron and steel or of motor vehicles, and roughly the same as textiles (7.5%) and gas and oil (8.6%)."
[3] An alarming picture. But are these figures reliable? What exactly is meant by ‘transnational
organised crime’, and does it really exist?

Nevertheless, over the last decade this has led to efforts of the international community to counter the
alleged proliferation of what is now called ‘transnational organised crime’ and money laundering. More recently, especially
since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the ‘criminal underworld’ is increasingly merged with that of political terrorism and
constructed into one underground ‘axis of evil’ of drug trafficking, transnational organised crime and international terrorism
that is a major global security threat. The issue is not just an academic exercise, because serious policy­making depends on
the rather vague conceptualisation of ‘organised crime’ and ‘terrorism’.

TNIs Crime & Globalisation project aims to look at the links between the current process of globalisation
[4] and this alleged threat of 'transnational organised crime'.

A body of multilateral agreements have been put in place ‘to fight the scourge’ at the international level.
At the UN and G7/G8 level conventions against transnational organised crime and regulations to counter money laundering are
accepted, while the UN Security Council set in motion a global programme against international terrorism. A new international
consensus on how to fight this ‘underground axis of evil’ seems to be emerging. The agenda is dominated by a concept of national
security that is extended into a global one undermining the current globalisation process. This basic paradigm is increasingly
being questioned. Many doubt whether it will be effective and point to the averse effects it might have on civil liberties,
human rights and national sovereignty in the field of criminal justice.

Nobody doubts international action is required to counter the adverse effects of crime that is increasingly
transnational just as any other economic activity, as well as the damaging impact of illegal money in the economy and the
dangers of political terrorism. The question is if the current strategies are appropriate, just and effective and if the
priorities are right. As one scholar has put it, under the Transnational Organised Crime Convention, you can have three
burglars and a window cleaning business, providing the money is moved overseas, and this structure meets the criteria for
transnational organised crime. The issue of corporate or white collar crime and its international ramifications that have
increased since the deregulation and privatisation trends in the current globalisation process, is absent in the discussions
and agreements despite its damaging effects on the national and global economy and social fabric. It seems easier to identify
a common enemy of ‘alien’ criminals and terrorists outside civil society than to look at the enemy within of corporate business
gone astray. The difference between a profiteering criminal and pioneering entrepreneur is not always that clear.

Nonetheless, the question remains if the current globalisation process in itself is not generating the crime
and violence that threatens it, not only as an evident side effect – but exacerbating already existing conditions of poverty
and inequality. The present era of globalisation, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets
and the repercussions on people, according to the 1999 HDR: "Global integration is proceeding at breakneck speed and with
amazing reach. But the process is uneven and unbalanced, with uneven participation of countries and people in the expanding
opportunities of globalisation – in the global economy, in global technology, in the global spread of cultures and in global
governance. The new rules of globalisation –and the players writing them– focus on integrating global markets, neglecting the
needs of people that markets cannot meet. The process is concentrating power and marginalizing the poor, both countries and
people." [5] 

Or, in the words of Susan George: "Globalization is creating a three-track society in which there will
be the exploiters, the exploited and the outcasts, the people who are not even worth exploiting. [6]
The current 'corporate-driven, neo-liberal globalisation' results in increasing inequalities between rich and poor, both within
and between countries – and many are marginalized, specifically in the less developed world with weak state institutions and
fragile economies burdened by debt payments. However, those marginalized will not passively wait until they starve to death,
but will create their own means to survive whether in the legal economy or in the illegal one – and more often in the grey area
that lies in between. These criminogenic aspects of the globalisation process itself are habitually overlooked. 

Marginalization forces people into what one can describe as a ‘migration into illegality’. Not only
literally trying to gain access to the sealed of border of the rich developed world where they often end as underpaid illegal
immigrants, but also figuratively – migrating into illegal activities because the licit economy has nothing to offer them. A
multitude of impoverished are a convenient work force for, and potential victims of, criminal organisations: peasant farmer
communities in the Andes and Central and South-East Asia depending on coca bush and opium poppy cultivation simply to survive;
human trafficking and prostitution rackets; the slums of major Brazilian city’s taken over by violent and competing drug gangs
replacing state authority; an army of impoverished drug ‘mulas’ – couriers – carrying drugs to the consumer markets in the
North; piracy of intellectual property rights such as patents, trademarks and industrial design, etc.

The development of ‘shadow’ or ‘underground’ economies is a major challenge to good governance. It is in
the grey area of unregulated informal markets, that illegal and legal economic actors meet. Consider here the role of private
companies in condoning or actively engaging in illegal activities, such as cigarette contraband, money laundering, the illegal
diamond and logging trade, environmental crime in mining and oil industries, employment of unregulated work forces, bribing
state officials for contracts etc. Corruption, failed states and civil conflicts often result where such economies grow
disproportionately. The damaging effects on economies, democracies and societies are real. At the same time, it is also in this
realm that the marginalized subsist and survive. Often, informal economies provide for subsistence strategies of the marginalized
that suffer the conequences of a global economic system that is not able to meet the needs of all. It is in this complex context
that the TNI Crime & Globalisation project is being defined.

The project will look at the impact of the activities of criminal networks on the global economic system,
particularly the international financial system, and at links between the consequences of the "migration into illegality",
good governance, failed states, civil conflicts. This will also include looking at the nature and impact of international and
multilateral policy initiatives in this regard, with particular reference to inter alia the United Nations Office of Drugs
and Crime and the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering initiated by G7 governments. In order to do this, the TNI
Crime & Globalisation project will organise seminars around the issues that might form the basis of a long-term
programme:

• The Economic Impact of the Illicit Drug Industry
  Expert
  seminar held at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, 5-6 December 2003.
  Goal of the seminar was to assess the global
  business volume of the illegal drug industry and to look where the illegal proceeds of the industry are going. Issues discussed
  included: the size of the illicit drug economy and the flows, investments and collusion of drugs money in the legal economy the
  façade of money laundering control and the alleged funding of international terrorism through drug trafficking. It also
  discussed deficiencies in current research; and propose new areas and lines of research. The seminar illustrated the widespread
  recourse to inflated figures, doubtful evaluation processes and the institutional need for numbers. 

• Global Enforcement Regimes: Transnational Organised Crime, International Terrorism and
  Money Laundering
  Amsterdam, 28-29 April 2005.
  The seminar will look at the developments in the multilateral
  agreements and conventions on drug control, money laundering, transnational organised crime and terrorism and their dangers
  for civil liberties, human rights and sovereignty, and the question of who is setting the agenda on these issues.

• The Criminogenic Aspects of Globalisation: Migration Into Illegality
  
  Somewhere in 2006.
  The seminar will deal with the effects of marginalization that drive people into informal or shadow
  economies and its relation with criminal networks who profit from this development and the role of some transnational
  corporations condoning or actively engaging in illegal activities.

[1] United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),
Human Development Report 1999: Globalization with a Human
Face, Oxford University Press: New YorkOxford, 1999, p. 103.

[2] Human Development Report 1999, pp. 5 and 42.

[3] Human Development Report 1999, p. 41.

[4] Globalisation is a vague concept. What is now called globalisation is in fact
a new cycle in a process that started several hundred years ago when trade expanded across borders and continents. The notion
of borders (and passports to cross them) is, by the way, a quite recent phenomenon in the process. As Susan George rightly
noted (see: Corporate-led Globalisation) it is better never to
use the word 'globalisation' without qualifying it: the current cycle is a 'corporate-led, corporate-driven globalisation'
based on a neo-liberal ideology that has been carefully constructed over the past decades, that emphasizes neo-liberal
doctrines and policies such as free trade, investments and capital flows, privatisation of public services, deregulation etc.
As such it is not an unavoidable natural disaster but a dynamic and flexible process – with is own contradictions – that can be
altered according to other, more socially acceptable doctrines.

[5] Human Development Report 1999, p. 30.

[6] Susan George, The Corporate Utopian
Dream: The WTO and the Global War System, Seattle, Washington, 28 November 1999.