memo #1. Organized Crime
October 2007
Felix Berenskoetter and Holger Stritzel*
1. SUMMARY
• Organised crime has become a major issue in the security discourse in domestic, regional and international contexts and is of central importance to many of the EU’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ policies.
• The main controversy among experts is about the adequacy of portraying organised crime as a distinct form of crime and about the appropriateness of an ‘enforcement approach’ to address it.
• This debate tends to neglect deeper and more important questions over conceptions of ‘order’, the ‘victim’ and the treatment of ‘weak’ and/or ‘bad’ states’ as sources for organised crime.
• It is pertinent for policy- and opinion-makers to more openly discuss the assumptions on which ‘organised crime’ rests and be aware of the institutional and operational consequences.
2. POLITICAL RELEVANCE
The issue of organised crime is not new. It received early imprints in 19th century Italy and early 20th century USA where, after the Second World War, it was discussed in the context of crime commissions and several political committees since the 1950s. From the US the concept has spread throughout the world and has been adapted to several local, national and international contexts, entering public discourse through popular images of the ‘Italian Mafia.’ At least since the end of the Cold War the issue of organised crime has turned into a major security concern for most governments. At the global level the fight against organised crime has been laid down in the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The UN convention has been significantly driven by European governments, who have come to declare organised crime a major ‘challenge’ to their security (according to the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS), organised crime is one of five main security challenges facing EU member states).
At the operational level the fight against organised crime has found its way into two EU Action Plans in 1997 and 2000 as well as into the 1999 Tampere Conclusions and its Hague successors. It has also been central in the accession negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania and is a major concern of EU initiatives in the Balkan region. In the EU the threat assessment led to notable institutional developments, on three levels. First, it has led to an increased internal cooperation in police and judicial affairs leading to the creation of an EU-internal Area Of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) which is linked to, second, cooperation regarding immigration and external border-control and the strengthening of EU’s external border(s), such as the border control agency FRONTEX. A third response is to address the ‘external dimension’ of organised crime through missions under the banner of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The topic gains added relevance due to the overlap seen between ‘fighting’ organised crime and ‘fighting’ terrorism (in particular on the level of financing).
3. PERSPECTIVES
The issue of organised crime has always been hotly contested. In domestic contexts a major line of controversy has been whether certain patterns of criminality that seemed to evolve in European countries since the 1970s should be portrayed as a distinct form of crime for which a new label would be needed. In the ensuing debate, advocates and opponents of the label talked past rather than with each other.
Advocates argued that a new pattern could be identified which would justify the prefix ‘organised’. Their discussions centred around the nature of its organisational structure, with most assuming that organised crime would be marked by a high degree of functional differentiation within the organisation and a graded hierarchy in the chain of command. The consequence at the operational level was to call for more proactive policing strategies and techniques that were to identify organisational structures and the ‘heads’ and ‘masterminds’ rather than those who actually committed the crimes. In recent years this has been gradually supplemented by a view which conceives the ‘organised’ in terms of more loosely associated and less hierarchical networks. By contrast, opponents of the label questioned its very validity and criticised the policies justified by it. More precisely, they argued that a distinct form of crime did not exist and that police strategies and techniques mobilised to battle ‘organised crime’ were curtailing civil liberties at the expense of no recognizable added safety for society. Thus, they accused advocates of this new approach to ‘crime’ of changing open societies into a total policing state. As a result, the debate increasingly turned into a controversy whether the phenomenon of ‘organised crime’ actually existed.
These different perspectives can also be found on the policy level. Major debates in the UN and the EC/EU focussed on discussing specific problems of drug abuse, human trafficking or money laundering and the concrete measures that should be taken to address them. Especially in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ emerging in the 1980s major lines of disagreement arose around questions of security versus liberty and prevention versus repression. Those advocating an enforcement approach argued that organised crime would need to be fought at different sites simultaneously as the activities of criminals were said to be functionally differentiated and spread across state borders. In particular in Europe this portrayal of organised crime as a transnational phenomenon was a major imperative to argue for more cooperation and a corresponding strengthening of institutions at the international level. To opponents this enforcement approach overlooked unintended consequences both at national and international levels. They argued that thriving for security this way would not lead to more security but a waste of resources, the criminalisation of victims and the militarisation of what was seen as falling into the realm of development politics.
4. ANALYSIS
In the first instance, the debate over ‘organised crime’ is about naming and communicating a threat. Yet language is not only a vehicle of communication but always has consequences as it structures debates and, depending on the language we use, empowers certain actors and legitimises certain activities while marginalizing others. This raises pertinent questions which are insufficiently addressed in the debate between ‘advocates’ and ‘opponents’: which ‘issues’ are being captured under the label ‘organised crime’, and why those and not others? What are the consequences of framing them as such? Most fundamentally, what are the assumptions on the basis of which the phenomenon of ‘organised crime’ rests?
The use of the label ‘organised crime’ continues to have decisive influence on how the public perceives certain issues and segments of society. It often reinforces popular stereotypes by associating it with certain ethnic or immigrant groups, whereas ‘white collar crime’ remains captured under the label ‘corruption’. Ideas about the structure of organised crime groups also had significant impact on centralising institutions of law enforcement. Indeed, the latter often was not only result of but intertwined with identifying a rise in ‘organised crime’.
Crime is generally said to be ‘committed’ and therefore attached to certain kind of behaviour, that is, one speaks of crime as a practice rather than a property. Clarifying the threat posed by this practice requires answering two questions.
First, who is threatened? Common sense suggests that the occurrence of a crime involves a victim, which begets the question how to think about the ‘victim’. The damage done by practices such as money laundering often refers to vague notions of ‘society’ or ‘the economy’. In more abstract terms, a practice is generally termed criminal when it is thought to violate an established norm, which means that identifying criminal behaviour requires prior identification of a norm that can be deviated from. A definition of crime, then, is always made against the backdrop of a definition of order (understood as a structure of norms). Yet identifying the victim must go beyond the notion of ‘order’ and move to the human dimension, that is, it must specify the human(s) negatively affected (‘hurt’) by a certain behaviour.
Second, who threatens? Official definitions associate organised crime to the behaviour of a “structured group” existing over a period of time, yet pinning down what makes a group ‘structured’ is made even more difficult by its transnational (rather than international) character. The idea of a transnationally (or ‘globally’) organised group makes it difficult to locate the threat in anything other than transnational space. Yet what sounds compelling in the abstract is extremely difficult to do in practice: while the ESS describes organised crime as an ‘internal threat’ with an ‘important external dimension’, its sources are often located in the EU-external space.
Popular shortcuts in answering the question where the threat comes from picture organised crime as facilitated by ‘globalisation’ and as emerging from ‘failed’ or ‘weak’ states characterized by a breakdown of structures of governance. Both links are highly problematic. While the association with ‘globalisation’ merely introduces another abstract (and often negatively perceived) phenomenon which dilutes rather than specifies ‘organised crime’, it is the fall-back into state centric thinking which is most problematic, for two reasons:
(1) The judgment of a states’ governing structure is intrinsically tied up to the understanding of what is a ‘good’ order and its absence invites merging ‘failed and/or weak’ states with ‘strong’ states and ‘bad’ orders. The problem with such thinking is visible in Afghanistan, where development into a ‘Narco’ state occurred after the removal of ‘strong’ (and arguably ‘bad’) governance under the Taliban.
(2) The view that organised crime is a ‘cross-border’ phenomenon does not allow to artificially uphold the internal/external divide and to portray ‘the state’ as either perpetrator or, indeed, as a victim attacked from the outside. Rather, it points to more difficult questions how/in what sense ‘the state’, or which part of society, is affected and whether those involved in the cross-border flow (e.g., trafficked human beings) are ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’.
5. IMPLICATIONS
Organised crime is a vague yet at the same time prominent phenomenon in the political and public discourse and one that is often hotly debated. While ‘advocates’ of the organised crime label start from a fixed understanding of order, victim and crime, ‘opponents’ emphasise the contingency of these categories and scrutinize their fixation as political acts.
Participants on either side, as well as those distributing the images in the popular media, must be aware that the language and images used to portray organised crime are closely tied up with institutional and operational consequences and need to be considered very carefully. Picturing it as a distinct form of criminality, as well as the specification of its structure, impacts police strategies and techniques. Portraying it as a transnational phenomenon has produced enormous momentum for cooperation, in particular among EU member states, yet the desire to adopt a common approach against ‘organised crime’ meets the difficult task of ordering a pluralistic and fluid political community. Attempt to do so by associating it with similar vague phenomena of ‘globalisation’ or ‘failed states’ only provides a false sense of improved understanding.
Thus, before discussing and investing in means to ‘fight’ organised crime it is important to address deeper questions concerning threat, order, and victims, and to consider the consequences for the answers chosen. Such a debate requires going beyond the ‘technical’ and the ‘critical’ level to make practitioners aware of the responsibility that comes with filling the label ‘organised crime’ with meaning.
Further Reading
- Felix Berenskoetter (2008): ‘Under Construction: ESDP and the Fight Against Organised Crime’, Journal of Intervention and State Building, 2 (2), forthcoming.
- Holger Stritzel (2007): ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13 (3): 357-383.
- Dennis J. Kenney and James O. Finckenauer (1995): Organized Crime in America, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
∗ London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International Relations, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, email: f.s.berenskoetter@lse.ac.uk and h.stritzel@lse.ac.uk. 1 Following initiatives like the 1988 UN Convention against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances or the 1995 Naples Political Declaration and Global Action Plan against Transnational Organised Crime.
Felix Berenskoetter and Holger Stritzel*
1. SUMMARY
• Organised crime has become a major issue in the security discourse in domestic, regional and international contexts and is of central importance to many of the EU’s ‘internal’ and ‘external’ policies.
• The main controversy among experts is about the adequacy of portraying organised crime as a distinct form of crime and about the appropriateness of an ‘enforcement approach’ to address it.
• This debate tends to neglect deeper and more important questions over conceptions of ‘order’, the ‘victim’ and the treatment of ‘weak’ and/or ‘bad’ states’ as sources for organised crime.
• It is pertinent for policy- and opinion-makers to more openly discuss the assumptions on which ‘organised crime’ rests and be aware of the institutional and operational consequences.
2. POLITICAL RELEVANCE
The issue of organised crime is not new. It received early imprints in 19th century Italy and early 20th century USA where, after the Second World War, it was discussed in the context of crime commissions and several political committees since the 1950s. From the US the concept has spread throughout the world and has been adapted to several local, national and international contexts, entering public discourse through popular images of the ‘Italian Mafia.’ At least since the end of the Cold War the issue of organised crime has turned into a major security concern for most governments. At the global level the fight against organised crime has been laid down in the 2000 UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime and its protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. The UN convention has been significantly driven by European governments, who have come to declare organised crime a major ‘challenge’ to their security (according to the 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS), organised crime is one of five main security challenges facing EU member states).
At the operational level the fight against organised crime has found its way into two EU Action Plans in 1997 and 2000 as well as into the 1999 Tampere Conclusions and its Hague successors. It has also been central in the accession negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania and is a major concern of EU initiatives in the Balkan region. In the EU the threat assessment led to notable institutional developments, on three levels. First, it has led to an increased internal cooperation in police and judicial affairs leading to the creation of an EU-internal Area Of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) which is linked to, second, cooperation regarding immigration and external border-control and the strengthening of EU’s external border(s), such as the border control agency FRONTEX. A third response is to address the ‘external dimension’ of organised crime through missions under the banner of the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP). The topic gains added relevance due to the overlap seen between ‘fighting’ organised crime and ‘fighting’ terrorism (in particular on the level of financing).
3. PERSPECTIVES
The issue of organised crime has always been hotly contested. In domestic contexts a major line of controversy has been whether certain patterns of criminality that seemed to evolve in European countries since the 1970s should be portrayed as a distinct form of crime for which a new label would be needed. In the ensuing debate, advocates and opponents of the label talked past rather than with each other.
Advocates argued that a new pattern could be identified which would justify the prefix ‘organised’. Their discussions centred around the nature of its organisational structure, with most assuming that organised crime would be marked by a high degree of functional differentiation within the organisation and a graded hierarchy in the chain of command. The consequence at the operational level was to call for more proactive policing strategies and techniques that were to identify organisational structures and the ‘heads’ and ‘masterminds’ rather than those who actually committed the crimes. In recent years this has been gradually supplemented by a view which conceives the ‘organised’ in terms of more loosely associated and less hierarchical networks. By contrast, opponents of the label questioned its very validity and criticised the policies justified by it. More precisely, they argued that a distinct form of crime did not exist and that police strategies and techniques mobilised to battle ‘organised crime’ were curtailing civil liberties at the expense of no recognizable added safety for society. Thus, they accused advocates of this new approach to ‘crime’ of changing open societies into a total policing state. As a result, the debate increasingly turned into a controversy whether the phenomenon of ‘organised crime’ actually existed.
These different perspectives can also be found on the policy level. Major debates in the UN and the EC/EU focussed on discussing specific problems of drug abuse, human trafficking or money laundering and the concrete measures that should be taken to address them. Especially in the context of the ‘war on drugs’ emerging in the 1980s major lines of disagreement arose around questions of security versus liberty and prevention versus repression. Those advocating an enforcement approach argued that organised crime would need to be fought at different sites simultaneously as the activities of criminals were said to be functionally differentiated and spread across state borders. In particular in Europe this portrayal of organised crime as a transnational phenomenon was a major imperative to argue for more cooperation and a corresponding strengthening of institutions at the international level. To opponents this enforcement approach overlooked unintended consequences both at national and international levels. They argued that thriving for security this way would not lead to more security but a waste of resources, the criminalisation of victims and the militarisation of what was seen as falling into the realm of development politics.
4. ANALYSIS
In the first instance, the debate over ‘organised crime’ is about naming and communicating a threat. Yet language is not only a vehicle of communication but always has consequences as it structures debates and, depending on the language we use, empowers certain actors and legitimises certain activities while marginalizing others. This raises pertinent questions which are insufficiently addressed in the debate between ‘advocates’ and ‘opponents’: which ‘issues’ are being captured under the label ‘organised crime’, and why those and not others? What are the consequences of framing them as such? Most fundamentally, what are the assumptions on the basis of which the phenomenon of ‘organised crime’ rests?
The use of the label ‘organised crime’ continues to have decisive influence on how the public perceives certain issues and segments of society. It often reinforces popular stereotypes by associating it with certain ethnic or immigrant groups, whereas ‘white collar crime’ remains captured under the label ‘corruption’. Ideas about the structure of organised crime groups also had significant impact on centralising institutions of law enforcement. Indeed, the latter often was not only result of but intertwined with identifying a rise in ‘organised crime’.
Crime is generally said to be ‘committed’ and therefore attached to certain kind of behaviour, that is, one speaks of crime as a practice rather than a property. Clarifying the threat posed by this practice requires answering two questions.
First, who is threatened? Common sense suggests that the occurrence of a crime involves a victim, which begets the question how to think about the ‘victim’. The damage done by practices such as money laundering often refers to vague notions of ‘society’ or ‘the economy’. In more abstract terms, a practice is generally termed criminal when it is thought to violate an established norm, which means that identifying criminal behaviour requires prior identification of a norm that can be deviated from. A definition of crime, then, is always made against the backdrop of a definition of order (understood as a structure of norms). Yet identifying the victim must go beyond the notion of ‘order’ and move to the human dimension, that is, it must specify the human(s) negatively affected (‘hurt’) by a certain behaviour.
Second, who threatens? Official definitions associate organised crime to the behaviour of a “structured group” existing over a period of time, yet pinning down what makes a group ‘structured’ is made even more difficult by its transnational (rather than international) character. The idea of a transnationally (or ‘globally’) organised group makes it difficult to locate the threat in anything other than transnational space. Yet what sounds compelling in the abstract is extremely difficult to do in practice: while the ESS describes organised crime as an ‘internal threat’ with an ‘important external dimension’, its sources are often located in the EU-external space.
Popular shortcuts in answering the question where the threat comes from picture organised crime as facilitated by ‘globalisation’ and as emerging from ‘failed’ or ‘weak’ states characterized by a breakdown of structures of governance. Both links are highly problematic. While the association with ‘globalisation’ merely introduces another abstract (and often negatively perceived) phenomenon which dilutes rather than specifies ‘organised crime’, it is the fall-back into state centric thinking which is most problematic, for two reasons:
(1) The judgment of a states’ governing structure is intrinsically tied up to the understanding of what is a ‘good’ order and its absence invites merging ‘failed and/or weak’ states with ‘strong’ states and ‘bad’ orders. The problem with such thinking is visible in Afghanistan, where development into a ‘Narco’ state occurred after the removal of ‘strong’ (and arguably ‘bad’) governance under the Taliban.
(2) The view that organised crime is a ‘cross-border’ phenomenon does not allow to artificially uphold the internal/external divide and to portray ‘the state’ as either perpetrator or, indeed, as a victim attacked from the outside. Rather, it points to more difficult questions how/in what sense ‘the state’, or which part of society, is affected and whether those involved in the cross-border flow (e.g., trafficked human beings) are ‘innocent’ or ‘guilty’.
5. IMPLICATIONS
Organised crime is a vague yet at the same time prominent phenomenon in the political and public discourse and one that is often hotly debated. While ‘advocates’ of the organised crime label start from a fixed understanding of order, victim and crime, ‘opponents’ emphasise the contingency of these categories and scrutinize their fixation as political acts.
Participants on either side, as well as those distributing the images in the popular media, must be aware that the language and images used to portray organised crime are closely tied up with institutional and operational consequences and need to be considered very carefully. Picturing it as a distinct form of criminality, as well as the specification of its structure, impacts police strategies and techniques. Portraying it as a transnational phenomenon has produced enormous momentum for cooperation, in particular among EU member states, yet the desire to adopt a common approach against ‘organised crime’ meets the difficult task of ordering a pluralistic and fluid political community. Attempt to do so by associating it with similar vague phenomena of ‘globalisation’ or ‘failed states’ only provides a false sense of improved understanding.
Thus, before discussing and investing in means to ‘fight’ organised crime it is important to address deeper questions concerning threat, order, and victims, and to consider the consequences for the answers chosen. Such a debate requires going beyond the ‘technical’ and the ‘critical’ level to make practitioners aware of the responsibility that comes with filling the label ‘organised crime’ with meaning.
Further Reading
- Felix Berenskoetter (2008): ‘Under Construction: ESDP and the Fight Against Organised Crime’, Journal of Intervention and State Building, 2 (2), forthcoming.
- Holger Stritzel (2007): ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13 (3): 357-383.
- Dennis J. Kenney and James O. Finckenauer (1995): Organized Crime in America, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing.
∗ London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of International Relations, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, email: f.s.berenskoetter@lse.ac.uk and h.stritzel@lse.ac.uk. 1 Following initiatives like the 1988 UN Convention against the Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances or the 1995 Naples Political Declaration and Global Action Plan against Transnational Organised Crime.