convergence

The Criminal State
military advantage, represents a dangerous gap. Criminals are becoming politicians and government
officials. And top government officials and political leaders are doubling as the heads
of vast and often international criminal enterprises.
The term criminal state has been used to characterize countries as diverse as North Korea,
Russia, and Guinea-Bissau. What exactly do we mean by “criminal state”? In the simplest terms, a
criminal is one who has committed (or has been convicted of committing) a crime. By extension,
a criminal state is a state that has committed a crime. But we mean more than that; by criminal
state we generally imply systematic behavior and systemic characteristics. We certainly mean more
than mere complicity in illegal acts by corrupt individuals encumbering official positions, though
that is perhaps where we should begin. We are implying an ongoing pattern of engagement in
activities that contravene international law. Criminal state implies not only an ongoing pattern
of criminal behavior by individuals, but by a large number of officials, or even by whole organs
of the state apparatus, and the deployment of governmental assets and resources in support of
criminal undertakings. In some cases—which we will describe in this chapter—organs of the
state will even have formal assigned responsibility for engaging in criminal activities.
Rachel Locke suggests that criminal networks interact with the state in three ways: 1)
corruption describes a relationship in which a state permits or condones the actions of illicit
networks; 2) infiltration is a symbiotic relationship in which agents of illicit organizations or
networks are positioned within the government itself; and 3) competition is the situation in
which the state attempts to enforce its primacy over illicit organizations and networks. 5 In
only the second characterization—infiltration—is the state itself directly complicit in the
illicit activity. This typology, though useful in other contexts, is not effective in disaggregating
the complex of phenomena described broadly as criminal states. It ignores the situation in
which the state itself is the criminal agent, as opposed to just a few individuals at high levels.
Michael Hanlon defines criminal states as “organizations that fulfill the role of the state,
even though they are not recognized as an official governing authority.” 6 This definition seems
inherently problematic though, as he specifically distinguishes the organizations he is describing
(revolutionary movements) from the existing state apparatus, arguing that the former has
usurped certain narrow roles of the latter. But the autonomous state itself remains in this
construct—perhaps not effective, but not criminal either. This line of analysis is followed by
Cockayne and Lupel, who distinguish between predatory groups that compete with the state
in open conflict, parasitic groups that extract rents from populations and authority structures,
and symbiotic groups that “coexist with existing authority structures, either through overlaps
of membership or through other clandestine arrangements of reciprocity and joint venture
arrangements.” 7 In this analysis the symbiotic groups would come closest to our understanding
of the criminal state. If symbiosis is understood as a process, its advanced stages, in which the
state and the criminal organization cannot be distinguished, constitute a level of criminalization
of the state itself.
Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou provide a more comprehensive definition of criminal state:
The criminalization of politics and of the state may be regarded as the routinization, at
the very heart of political and governmental institutions and circuits, of practices whose
criminal nature is patent, whether as defined by the law of the country in question,
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