convergence

Keefe
If, as Phil Williams contends, organized crime is “best understood as the continuation
of commerce by other means,” and transnational criminal groups are “the illicit counterparts
of multinational corporations,” then it stands to reason that like their legitimate cousins, underworld
entrepreneurs might come to rely, in their global activities, upon certain especially
convenient logistical hubs. 5 Whether your cargo is narcotics or light arms, undocumented
people or dirty money, endangered species or highly enriched uranium, you will find that
some geographic locales prove to be especially congenial and can function as a staging area or
transshipment point or even a base of operations.
One fundamental insight in the emerging study of illicit networks is the notion that
underworld enterprises are mobile, even migratory; as nimble, dispersed, adaptive networks,
they can tailor their logistical footprints to the supply of raw goods and labor, the demands
of a global market, the shifting regulatory atmosphere in any given region, and pressures both
from competition and from law enforcement. Perhaps the most famous exemplar of this new
brand of globetrotting criminality, the arms broker Viktor Bout, initially based his operations
in Belgium. When authorities there began scrutinizing his munitions flights into war-torn
African countries, Bout simply relocated to the United Arab Emirates, then to South Africa,
and eventually to Moscow. 6
Federico Varese has recently questioned the assumption that criminal organizations
can easily relocate from one country to another, noting that “transplantation is fraught with
difficulties.” 7 And to be sure, we must be careful not to overstate the case: the very ad hoc,
decentralized nature of contemporary criminal networks renders some of the more alarmist
accounts of a rapacious campaign of coordinated expansion less than credible. But because
Varese’s critique focuses on traditional, geographically-rooted, hierarchical mafias whose primary
revenue stream is the collection of extortion, it overlooks the very networked attributes
that allow an enterprise like Viktor Bout’s to migrate. In my own study of the “snakeheads” of
southeast China, who in recent decades have smuggled hundreds of thousands of undocumented
migrants to destinations around the planet, I discovered a pronounced tendency on
the part of these immigration brokers to identify and exploit certain locations such as Bangkok
and Guatemala. 8 Whether it is gunrunners like Bout, snakeheads moving migrants, or
nuclear proliferators like A.Q. Kahn, some black market entrepreneurs have demonstrated an
extraordinarily sophisticated ability to engage in what Williams calls “jurisdictional arbitrage.” 9
Today, organized criminal groups from Nigeria alone are reportedly active in no fewer than
60 countries. 10
If we can agree that transnational criminal networks are mobile, and that like legitimate
multinationals they will migrate their operations to especially appealing locations, then it
stands to reason that some of these jurisdictions will emerge as hubs in the underground
economy. Given that by some estimates the illicit international economy may now account
for as much as 15 to 20 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP), you would think
that tallying the major geographic centers of this thriving shadow market would be an easy
and noncontroversial exercise. 11 The existence of places that are especially susceptible to transnational
organized crime has certainly been acknowledged, in a casual way, in the literature
of illicit networks. Observers have referred to these locations, variously as “geopolitical black
holes,” 12 “twilight zones,” 13 and “pseudo-states.” 14
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