Section 8: Transnational Organized Crime

8. Transnational Organized Crime > How Globalization Facilitates Transnational Crime > Lecture

• This section of the course will look at how this process promotes both legal and illegal profit making activities at the same time by exploiting, for example, the great global transportation and communication systems that make globalization possible.
• The Italian sociologists Monica Massari has described the criminogenic potential of the globalization process that is constantly creating new opportunities for transnational criminals.
• Globalization includes an enormous amount of economic activity that is estimated to be in the range of between $65 to $85 trillion worth of goods and services per year.
• According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, what is striking about the global map of trafficking routes is that the world’s biggest trading partners are also the world’s biggest markets for illicit goods and services.
• The UN Office on Drugs and Crime published in 2010 a long report that lists transnational criminal activities in terms of illicit commodities and specific threats.
• Trafficking in persons and smuggling of migrants, trafficking in cocaine, heroin, firearms, environmental resources, and counterfeit products, maritime piracy, and cybercrime.
• This 300-page document is filled with interesting and detailed descriptions of how transnational criminals plan and carry out their operations, and about the annual consumption or confiscation of illicit products.
• Transnational crime is inextricably linked to the global distribution of wealth and poverty.
• One can speak in abstract terms about globalization’s having positive and negative consequences in different parts of the world, or within a single country.
• The economist Joseph Stiglitz writes of asymmetric globalization that has put developing countries at a disadvantage because of unfair trade agreements the developed countries have imposed upon them.
• More candid depictions of the consequences of these imbalances of power use terms like, the dark side of globalization, the underbelly of globalization, or the dirty economy that co-exists alongside the clean economy.
• In the last analysis, this discussion is about the economic and social inequalities that are created, or sustained, or amplified by the globalization process.
• We should always keep in mind that the dark side and the underbelly of globalization have human faces.
• Studying the impacts of transnational crime in their gory details serves as a useful antidote to the social science jargon that, in its euphemizing way, numbs our ability to understand and empathize with the experiences of vulnerable and traumatized people.
• An enormous amount of transnational crime originates in the misery and desperation that result from increasing economic inequality around the globe.
• Traffickers in Latin America may also make use of entertainment networks, fashion agencies, employment agencies, marriage and tourism agencies, and newspaper advertisements to recruit victims.
• This list of situations and venues does not even include the bars, massage parlors, dancing clubs, pornography operations, and arranged marriage schemes in which trafficked women can be placed.
• This kind of information makes it clear that the transnational criminal exploitation of vulnerable women who are deceived and manipulated into traveling west to the prosperous Eurozone makes use of any number of social venues and relationships that are perfectly legitimate, rather than being criminal activities in and of themselves.
• The human trafficking that was just described involves a basic feature of globalization, the movement of large numbers of people across borders, and the consequences that follow their displacement from one place to another.
• One might say that it is a sign of globalization when a social phenomenon with criminal potential, such as human trafficking, catalyzes the formation of international groups to criticize it, monitor it, or even attempt to regulate it.
• The universality of the human sex drive and people’s attempts to satisfy it creates social institutions or practices that are examples of globalization.
• These institutions and practices, as we’ve seen, often incorporating an imbalance of power between exploiters and victims, and between men and women.
• One commentator calls the extremely profitable sexualization of many societies based on social domination an increasingly central aspect of current capitalist globalization.
• The French legal scholar Marie-Claire Belleau has studied the traffic in mail order brides and describes it too as a globalization phenomenon.
• The mail order bride industry is yet another example of a globalization phenomenon that is based on an imbalance of power that takes the form of social domination.