The Borderland Lens

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-122
Author(s):  
Annette Idler
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Security Policies ◽  
Recent History ◽  
Group Interactions ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
State Group

Chapter 3 explains how the gap between state-centric views on borderlines and transnational realities at the margins turn borderlands in vulnerable regions into extreme cases of complex security dynamics. First, it presents how state-centric views that stop at the borderline have historically shaped security policies toward the Colombia-Ecuador and Colombia-Venezuela borders. It then contrasts these with a transnational perspective that analyzes security dynamics from within the Colombian-Ecuadorian and Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. Adopting such a transnational borderland lens, the chapter maps violent non-state group interactions in recent history across these borderlands and contextualizes them with the spatial distribution of the various cocaine supply chain stages and interconnected forms of transnational organized crime. Together with socioeconomic and cultural conditions that vary along and across the borders, the logic of these illicit cross-border flows informs the groups’ motives for cooperation, which in turn shape their interactions.

The Logic of Illicit Flows in Armed Conflict

2020 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Idler
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Process Tracing ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Group Interactions ◽  
Supply Chain Networks ◽  
Illicit Flows

ABSTRACTWhy is there variation in how violent nonstate groups interact in armed conflict? Where armed conflict and organized crime converge in unstable regions worldwide, these groups sometimes enter cooperative arrangements with opposing groups. Within the same unstable setting, violent nonstate groups forge stable, long-term relations with each other in some regions, engage in unstable, short-term arrangements in others, and dispute each other elsewhere. Even though such paradoxical arrangements have intensified and perpetuated war, extant theories on group interactions that focus on territory and motivations overlook their concurrent character. Challenging the literature that focuses on conflict dynamics alone, the author argues that the spatial distribution of illicit flows influences how these interactions vary. By mapping cocaine supply chain networks, the author shows that long-term arrangements prevail at production sites, whereas short-term arrangements cluster at trafficking nodes. The article demonstrates through process tracing how the logic of illicit flows produces variation in the groups’ cooperative arrangements. This multiyear, multisited study includes over six hundred interviews in and about Colombia’s remote, war-torn borderlands.

scholarly journals Life in the ant trails

Focaal ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (85) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Vigh
Keyword(s):  
Organized Crime ◽  
Feedback Loops ◽  
Global Dynamics ◽  
Global Order ◽  
International Media ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Border Trade ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Borders

This article looks ethnographically at the cocaine trade in and through Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. It clarifies some of the less obvious aspects of illegal cross-border trade and ties the minor flow of drugs, often trafficked by the desperate and disenfranchised, to larger global dynamics. While international media and commentators alike frequently depict transnational organized crime as a pathogen attacking the healthy global order, a closer look at the Bissau cocaine trade clarifies that the trade is neither external nor parasitical but integral to it. The trade’s grasp of Bissau is anchored in enduring critical circumstance, stretching from the social to the political, and displays several ironic feedback loops and interdependencies linking misfortune in time and space. The article thus shows how negative conditions may travel and circulate in a manner that ramifies vulnerability across economic and political borders.

scholarly journals An Emerging Extraordinary Villain Transnational Organized Crime in the Perspective of Al-Shabaab Terrorist in SADC Regional. The Strategies of Scuffling Terrorism in the SADC Region

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 140-149
Author(s):  
Prosper Ng’andu
Keyword(s):  
Organized Crime ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Cross Border

Terrorism has ancient genesis since the Roman empires. The phenomenon has assumed an extraordinary villain among the pervasive cross border crime that has not spared SADC states

Organized Crime

2021 ◽  
pp. 177-186
Author(s):  
Serena Forlati
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Willingness To Adopt

Serena Forlati examines the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC). From an historical perspective. Standing back from the treaty, she analyses how the converging concerns of European states with cross-border crime and US concerns about the post-Cold War threat posed by organized crime together with a willingness to adopt flexible solutions made agreement on such a broad programmatic instrument possible.

scholarly journals Contested borders: organized crime, governance, and bordering practices in Colombia-Venezuela borderlands

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viviana García Pinzón ◽  
Jorge Mantilla
Keyword(s):  
Organized Crime ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Spatial Category ◽  
Criminal Organizations ◽  
The Common ◽  
Migration Flows ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Social Orders ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract Based on the conceptualizations of organized crime as both an enterprise and a form of governance, borderland as a spatial category, and borders as institutions, this paper looks at the politics of bordering practices by organized crime in the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. It posits that contrary to the common assumptions about transnational organized crime, criminal organizations not only blur or erode the border but rather enforce it to their own benefit. In doing so, these groups set norms to regulate socio-spatial practices, informal and illegal economies, and migration flows, creating overlapping social orders and, lastly, (re)shaping the borderland. Theoretically, the analysis brings together insights from political geography, border studies, and organized crime literature, while empirically, it draws on direct observation, criminal justice data, and in-depth interviews.

Labour Exploitation in Human Trafficking Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Weatherburn
Keyword(s):  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
Trafficking In Persons ◽  
Transnational Organized Crime ◽  
Labour Exploitation ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
United Nations Convention ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Agreed Definition

The 2000 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime provides the first internationally agreed definition of the human trafficking. However, in failings to clarify the exact scope and meaning of exploitation, it has created an ambiguity as to what constitutes exploitation of labour in criminal law. <br>The international definition's preference for an enumerative approach has been replicated in most regional and domestic legal instruments, making it difficult to draw the line between exploitation in terms of violations of labour rights and extreme forms of exploitation such as those listed in the Protocol. <br><br>This book addresses this legal gap by seeking to conceptualise labour exploitation in criminal law.

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