convergence

The Criminal State
zones, criminal takeover, and oligarchic regimes.” 10 An innovative attribute of this framework
is its inclusion of criminal states animated by religious or ideological motivations, such as
Afghanistan’s Taliban or Lebanon’s Hizballah. These differ from the typical assumption of the
venal motivations of criminals and criminal states. According to this pair of scholars, “Such a
state is anathema to the modern state-form and criminal in its orientation because, ultimately,
it was to merge with other conquered territories to form the new Caliphate envisioned by
al-Qaeda.” 11 Less persuasive is their description of criminal states emerging from state failure
and lawless zones. It can be argued that what they are describing here is a condition arising
from the absence of a state, rather than an entity engaged in criminal activity.
What we propose below is an exploratory effort to disaggregate further the basket of
states referred to as criminal states, based not on their motivations or morphology but on their
degree of criminalization. We have argued elsewhere that “increasingly, fighting transnational
crime must mean more than curbing the traffic of counterfeit goods, drugs, weapons, and
people; it must also involve preventing and reversing the criminalization of governments.” 12
Likewise, to preserve the sovereignty of legitimate states, we must prevent and reverse this
corrosive process. But to meet these challenges, we must distinguish between states with
corrupt officials, states that operate large-scale criminal enterprises, and states that are themselves
large-scale criminal enterprises. The typology developed below is intended to assist in
this effort at differentiation. Four characterizations are proposed to describe differing levels
of criminal network entanglement with the state. To be clear, the dynamics of transition from
one level of criminal consolidation to another must be the focus of future research. We do not
assume that these levels represent a linear progression in which a state progresses from one
level to the next with inevitability. We do not yet know if that is true. We merely know that
there are different degrees of state criminality and that effectively preventing or reversing the
further decline into criminalization will require a full array of tools and approaches, as well as
a high degree of sensitivity to individual case and context-specificity.
Criminal Penetration
As noted above, corruption and illicit networks exist in all states alongside the normal complement
of governmental and civil society structures and networks. Their presence may be more
or less extensive, more or less corrosive, and more or less disruptive, but they are always there.
In some states there may be a terrorist or insurgent presence alongside traditional criminal
networks and organizations. Though terrorists, insurgents, and criminals do not inevitably
interact, it is well known that their mutual hesitation to interact has declined and such interactions
are becoming more common. At a certain point, what we might call the normal—or an
acceptable level of—consolidation among illicit networks within a state is exceeded, and a process
of erosion or atrophy of the state itself may begin and the legitimacy of the state, already
often tenuous, becomes even further compromised in the eyes of its citizens. The presence or
expansion of criminality becomes an international security threat when the impact of criminal,
insurgent, or terrorist activity is felt in other states. And such cross-border effects inevitably
become dramatically more likely when groups on either side of a border establish persistent
connectivity and interaction.
157