Kleptocratic Interdependence : Trafficking, Corruption, and the Marriage of Politics and Illicit Profits
How fundamentally new and different is “organized crime” in today's increasingly globalized world? How extensive are the ostensibly expanding links between international organized crime and domestic, state-based corruption, and how significant a threat do such links pose? And why, since conventional wisdom suggests corruption and criminality are most likely to thrive where governance is weakest, and border porosity greatest, are many of the world's most significant transnational criminal networks actually based in advanced industrial (democratic) states? In this cross-national data-analysis and theory-building paper, I demonstrate that while the links between transnational criminal organizations and domestic-level corruption are real and substantial, their effects are highly variable, both in degree and in consequence. In the most egregious cases, the relationships between criminals and corrupt officials may assume an advanced form of what I call “kleptocratic interdependence” - a set of profit- and power-driven, self-reinforcing relationships marked by: 1) a division of political, functional, and social control between state and non-state actors, i.e., the sharing of sovereignty functions traditionally viewed as residing with the state; 2) a privileging of private gain over public good; 3) an absence or dearth of legal and juridical accountability; and 4) some measure of fusion between the licit and illicit economic realms. Indeed, one might usefully think of kleptocratic interdependence as a malevolent stepchild of Keohane and Nye’s “complex interdependence,” which emphasized the significance of the myriad, and growing number of, complex transnational connections between states and societies. Although these symbiotic and strategic inter-relationships are not themselves novel, in our new so-called “flattened” world, such relationships provide the criminal and the corrupt(able) new economic and political opportunities to exploit. As the paper explores in some detail, these relationships also enable these self-same actors to attain new levels of prominence and power - which permit them to straddle borders, to scale the figurative and literal walls designed to keep them out, and to threaten both national and international security in a variety of innovative and unprecedented ways
Year of publication: |
2009
|
---|---|
Authors: | Greenhill, Kelly M. |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Saved in:
freely available
Saved in favorites
Similar items by person
-
Fiction, 'Social Facts' and the Construction of National Security Policy
Greenhill, Kelly M., (2010)
-
Greenhill, Kelly M., (2016)
-
Weapons of mass migration : forced displacement, coercion, and foreign policy
Greenhill, Kelly M., (2010)
- More ...