1
War Making and State Making as Organized Crime
(Tilly, 1985)

• If protection rackets represent organized crime
  at its smoothest, then war making and state
  making quintessential protection rackets with
  the advantage of legitimacy - qualify as our
  largest examples of organized crime.

2
What do States Do?

• War making eliminate/neutralize their own rivals
  outside the territories in which they have clear
  continuous priority as wielders of force
• State making eliminating or neutralizing their
  rivals inside those territories
• Protection eliminate/neutralize the enemies of
  their clients
• Extraction acquiring the means of carrying out
  the above

3
Classic European state-making followed this
causal pattern
(Tilly, 1985, p. 183)
4
Global Organized Crime

• James H. Mittelman (Excerpted from Mittelman,
  Global Organized Crime, in The Globalization
  Syndrome, Princeton, 2000)

5
Global Organized Crime

• a transnational enterprise
• involving multiple persons
• organized on a hierarchical basis
• for the purpose of securing profit and power by
  engaging in illegal activities
• ? TNCO transnational criminal organization

6
The New Criminality

• Globalization presents opportunities for new
  forms of illegality that crop up between
  established codes of international law, challenge
  existing norms, infiltrate licit (lawful)
  businesses and extend into international finance
• e.g., computer crimes, money laundering, stealing
  nuclear materials and sophisticated fraud

7
Sophisticated Fraud

• fraud intentional deception to gain an advantage
  or cause harm to another
• sophisticated fraud relies on technological
  complexity among several parties using
  counterfeit bank statements, credit cards,
  letters of credit, computer intrusion, and
  ingenuity of design
• e.g., stock market pump dump scams and
  pyramid/Ponzi schemes

8
The Great Transformation comes to the Global
South

• Rapid marketization ? social dislocation ? rural
  resentment peasant uprisings
• Polanyis double movement (transformation
  countermovement)

9
Poverty trap of declining incomes in countryside
and limited legal opportunities in cities leads
people to seek emigration services

• When poverty is severe, criminal gangs flourish
  (236)
• Smuggling groups exploit the impoverished
• Smuggling operations depend on powerful and
  wealthy criminals with the resources to corrupt
  state officials
• Corruption of political authorities is the
  crucible in which customs officers, police and
  tax inspectors assist in the crime or look other
  way
• at play in all kinds of smuggling/dealing in
  contraband

10
Causes of rise in transnational criminal
organizations (TNCOs)

• Technological innovations allowing for increased
  mobility of people some carrying contraband
  and flow of illicit goods
• esp air travel, telecommunications, use of
  computers in business
• contraband goods whose importation or
  exportation or possession is prohibited by law
• Technological innovations that facilitate
  cross-border operations
• e.g., satellite technology, fiber optic cable,
  and the miniaturization of computers
• Hypercompetition
• Deregulation, by lowering state barriers to free
  flows of capital, goods, services, and labor

11
Like TNCs, TNCOs operate above and below the
state

• Above the state they capitalize on globalizing
  tendencies of permeable borders and deregulation
• Below/beside the state they offer incentives to
  those marginalized by globalization, esp. the
  impoverished substratum

12
Is such crime a kind of resistance to neoliberal
globalization?

• The marginalized represent the labor supply in
  the form of social forces participating in
  parallel economy of organized (and unorganized)
  crime and impairing the licit channels of
  neoliberalism
• The supply side, then, may be regarded as a
  disguised form of resistance to dominant mode of
  globalization

13
TNCOs economic or political?

• Profit comes not merely from theft but from
  emulating market mechanisms
• Whereas GOC groups have ostensibly economic
  objectives, to extent that they undermine the
  main actors in the globalization process TNCs
  and dominant states then TNCOs are both a
  political component of, and a response to,
  globalization

14
TNCOs are similar to legit TNCs

• Embrace logic of market, flexible, hierarchical,
  e.g., triads
• triads Chinese criminal networks
• based in Hong Kong, Macau, mainland China, and
  also in countries with significant Chinese
  populations, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan,
  U.S. and Canada
• Hong Kong triads provide leadership, while
  commercial tongs (merchants guilds), many based
  in Chinatowns, act as local subsidiaries, whose
  activities are facilitated by guanxi
  (connections) in Eastern Asia

15
Global cities, more than states, are the main
loci of TNCOs

• Offer agglomerations of financial services
• Sources of technological innovation, advanced
  communications and transportation systems
• Given vast scope of internet, cybergangs can
  assault a global city from anywhere and remain
  anonymous
• Diversity allows TNCOs to blend into legit
  institutions in ethnic neighborhoods of diaspora
• Many such neighborhoods have weak ties to and are
  distrustful of the police, hampering law
  enforcement

16
GL of organized crime threatens state authority

• The state, according to Webers influential
  conceptualization, exercises monopoly over the
  legitimate use of force within a territory
• GL of organized crime weakens basis of government
  and constrains its capacity
• While transnational subnational criminal groups
  do not seek to take over state apparatus, they
  contest the rationale of the state, esp in terms
  of its legitimate control of violence and
  maintenance of justice

17
Growing connections between the state and
organized crime give rise to more
state-sanctioned violence

• TNCOs involved in arms trade
• Political insurgents rely on TNCOs
• Privatization of security puts the activities of
  contracted military personnel outside the law,
  into a kind of legal grey zone

18
New forms of criminality undermine state
sovereignty, the inter-state system

• Paradox heavily laden with trappings of force,
  state is weakened but not powerless
• Traditional notion of jurisdiction based on
  territoriality is progressively brought into
  question

19
TNCOs are alternative social organizations that,
in some ways, challenge authority of state to
impose law

• offer commerce banking in black/gray markets
  that work outside regulatory frameworks
• buy, sell, and distribute contraband
• swift dispute resolution debt collection
  outside courts
• create maintain illegal cartels
• secure/protect businesses, and shelter them from
  competitors, the state, and rival criminals