convergence

Introduction
networks will operate wherever a profit can be made. No corner of the world is untouched by
transnational organized crime, and many illicit networks have multicontinental areas of operations.
Take, for example, the Sinaloa Cartel, which operates on five continents, earns billions
of dollars, and has successfully diversified beyond drugs to other criminal activities such as
kidnapping and money laundering.
Beyond their global operations, deviant entrepreneurs worldwide have demonstrated
that they can effectively shut down large urban spaces (such as the favelas of Brazil) and even
whole subregions (such as the Tri-Border Area where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet),
while usurping their host states’ basic functional capacity. They can and do provide social
services to local constituencies ranging from community protection to the provision of such
public goods as disaster relief, dispute resolution, and even garbage collection. The examples
are too numerous to mention in full but include Hizballah in Lebanon, criminal syndicates
in the favelas of Brazil’s megacities, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta
in Nigeria, and drug-trafficking organizations such as the now defunct Medellín Cartel in
Colombia. Over time, as the illicit economy grows and nonstate actors provide an increasing
range of social goods, a security and political vacuum emerges from the gradual erosion of state
power, legitimacy, and capacity, and the state is displaced by the same illicit networks that are
eating away at its legitimacy.
In addition to defying both borders and law enforcers, transnational illicit networks are
unrestrained by legislation, unimpeded by morality, empowered by vast amounts of cash,
and able to take advantage of all the latest technological developments. They use technology
for communications, even encrypted, to identify and recruit individuals with needed skills
and to exchange tradecraft secrets and lessons with other illicit groups and networks around
the world, manage their global enterprises, and plan global collaboration and operations.
Globalization involving the crossborder integration of value-added economic activity has
dominated international economic activity in recent years. For the past several decades, this
sort of economic activity has grown twice as fast as overall global economic growth. And while
new technologies have drawn the world’s communities into ever-closer physical and economic
proximity, they have not eliminated local differences in economic opportunities, moral attitudes
toward different sorts of economic activity, or the capacity of law enforcement agencies in
different parts of the world, resulting in what might be referred to as a “lumpy” environment.
Illicit networks depend on and benefit from the same technologies and innovations that help
legal private industry navigate this lumpy environment. This presents a substantial challenge
to government agencies that cannot adapt or adopt the technologies as rapidly as their networked
tormentors.
The old paradigm of fighting terrorism and transnational crime separately, utilizing
distinct sets of tools and methods, may not be sufficient to meet the challenges posed by
the convergence of these networks into a crime-terror-insurgency nexus. Violent nonstate
actors, including terrorist organizations and insurgent movements, seek to collaborate with
criminal networks—and in some cases become criminal networks—in order to finance acts of
terrorism and purchase the implements of destruction and killing. Terrorists and insurgents
can tap into the global illicit marketplace to underwrite their activities and acquire weapons
and other supplies vital to their operations. On the other hand, many transnational criminal
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