This is Stuart Patrick. On this installment of The Internationalist, we'll be talking about one of the biggest problems confronting the international community, and that's the scourge of transnational crime. We're fortunate today to be joined by one of the major experts in global crime, and that is Phil Williams, who's the POSVAR chair in international security at the University of Pittsburgh.
Phil, it's great to have you here. Stuart, it's great to be here. Many thanks. It's absolutely delighted to see you again.
It's often said that transnational criminals have been one of the... biggest beneficiaries of globalization. Is it true that transnational crime has exploded since the end of the Cold War?
And if I... A second question is why has it been so hard for nation-states, either individually or collectively, to actually come to grips with this phenomenon? I think two great questions.
I think the first is, I think it's clear, globalization has been very beneficial to transnational organized crime in several ways. I think first of all it's been a great facilitator. So the increase in global flows, for example, and the intermodal container have been absolutely wonderful for various kinds of smuggling and trafficking. So that's the first way. The second way is that I think globalization hasn't raised all boats.
It's actually a winners and losers. And its disruptive effect, I think, has actually caused people to have to go into organized crime and criminal activities and operate in illicit markets. as coping mechanisms. Has there been a connection at all between the increase in transnational criminal activity and movements towards liberalization of financial flows as well, and the creation of global capital markets and global financial flows? What you saw from the 70s onwards was the whole deregulation of the global financial system.
We've had some re-regulation to try to deal with money laundering, but it's not been particularly effective, I would argue. That took on further dimension after September 11th, when money laundering and terrorist finance were conflated, even though they're in fact very different. I think terrorists are about raising money and then using it for nefarious purposes.
And they generally don't launder much money. Whereas for criminals, it's all about the proceeds of crime, turning those proceeds from being illegitimate to seeming to be the product of legitimate activity. You mentioned terrorism. A lot of people, a lot has been made, particularly since 9-11, of this supposed nexus that is emerging between transnational organized criminal networks on the one hand and transnational terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah. What's the evidence?
How do you see this relationship? I think there's an awful lot of nonsense talked about that relationship. I think the term nexus is politically appealing, analytically appalling in this context.
So, but... There is some basis for it, and the basis for it is that what we've seen is a variety of violent armed groups, terrorists, insurgents, warlords, engaging criminal activity as a funding mechanism. And I think that's the key.
Sometimes when they engage in that criminal activity, they come into contact with criminal organizations. But for the most part, the direct group-to-group link is not that important, or is just a market activity or a supplier relationship. There are exceptions, and I think particularly in insurgencies, where the insurgents and criminals are co-located, both geographically and in what I call a common opportunity space.
In those circumstances, you tend to get cooperation. A good example is kidnapping in Iraq, where there were groups in it just for profit, but would sometimes kidnap people to order from the jihadi groups, and sometimes would even kidnap people on spec. with speculation, they could then sell them on. As a fundraising? So as a fundraising.
Well, for them, it was all about the profit. For the jihadi groups, it was both profit and politics. When you think about, in conventional wisdom, when one thinks about international criminals, the idea you often have in mind is this sort of the mafia, the hierarchical organization, you know, the sort of Pablo Escobars of a sort of previous generation.
Has the nature of... When we're talking about networks, has the nature of how these operations are organized changed? I think it has.
I think we've seen a lot more networked organizations which are not a strict hierarchy. But again, we have to be very careful. There's no single model of a criminal organization.
I think you can have a great variety of different kinds of organizational structure. One of the things, for example, we thought about for many years was the Ndrangheta, the group operating under Calabria, but also operating very extensively in Milan, and with a global presence. The standard view was that the Andrangheta was essentially networked. And then as a result, a couple of years ago, of a major electronic eavesdropping operation and then 300 arrests, they actually found that it was more hierarchical than they thought and that there was a kind of directing group at the top. So there are still are some models.
There are still. And then I think a lot of hybrids too that we don't fully understand. But I think the problem with a lot of people who study it is we tend to think sometimes this is the model, it's the only one.
And the world is really much more diverse. and complexity of that. A lot of people have pointed to the relationship between transnational criminal networks on the one hand and, say, weak and failing states. And I'm wondering how you see the relationship between sort of the sovereign territorial state on the one hand and criminal networks. What sort of attributes, if you were going to exploit a state, or a state that is not a state, do they look for?
And are they actually even dependent on states as much as conventional wisdom would have? I think they are. I mean, these are what Jim Rosner once called sovereignty-free actors. And I think states are very bad at dealing with sovereignty-free actors.
States are geared up, they're organized, both their diplomatic and their military capabilities are organized to deal with other states. So I think we found it very hard to adapt to non-state or sovereignty-free actors. So that's the big problem.
And I think you can see this in many ways. I mean, when the U.S. went into Iraq in the summer of 2003, there was a U.N. delegation that actually came and looked at organized crime, did this fabulous 30-page report saying, this is going to be a huge problem.
And one of the people on that delegation once told me that when they tried to brief U.S. military and civilian leaders in Iraq, they were met with a mixture of hostility and indifference. It's sort of not my lane. It's not my lane.
Right. And yet, it contributed to that enormous sense of security in the years after 2003. And then the insurgents jumped on the bandwagon and realized this could also be a big moneymaker. And I think this is true of general insurgencies everywhere now.
We've seen it with FARC, where some people think it's actually even transformed into just a drug trafficking organization. Although I don't buy that completely. I think it's much more a hybrid group. But we've seen it with FARC.
We see it with groups like the Taliban. The Kani Network in Afghanistan. So this is a global phenomena where a lot of political groups are using criminal activities as a funding mechanism. Now the Obama administration...
But it didn't deal with the weak state part of it. Generally I think organized crime loves weak states. It doesn't want failed states, but it likes weak states. Failed states are too complicated for everybody to deal with. But a weak state is wonderful.
All states have weaknesses. They have capacity gaps and functional holes. And criminals can exploit those. And sometimes they become a surrogate for the state.
And this is why I think many organized crime groups and certainly insurgencies provide alternative forms of governance. And the Pentagon's had this notion of ungoverned spaces. I think there are very few ungoverned spaces.
There are a lot of spaces that are alternatively governed by people we don't like. Right, alternatively governed, not ungoverned. Final question relates to... So what can be done at the multilateral level? I know that the Obama administration came out with a national strategy for confronting transnational organized crime.
The United States seems to come up with one about every 10 years or so. And the European security strategy of earlier, not quite a decade ago, talked about organized crime as one of the biggest threats. But at the international level, what are the major failings or weaknesses in the UN system or other organizations that you'd like to see filled?
Well, I think generally multilateralism is problematic. I mean, I think you've got to do it. But we tend to see lowest common denominator solutions. We see backpassing.
We see kind of dilution of policies because you could try to bring everybody on board through consensus. So I think there are inherent weaknesses in multilateralism. I also think both states and the community of states are still bureaucratic, hierarchical, slow to operate, slow to respond to groups that are very agile.
very networked, very flexible, and able to respond very quickly both to opportunities and to dangers. Well, Phil Williams, thank you so much for joining us on this installment of The Internationalist. If you'd like to join the conversation, please join us on my blog, The Internationalist, at cfr.org.