convergence

Introduction
such as rental properties and property sales. Investment in real estate also provides the illicit
network with safe house capacity from which to execute operations. The crime-terror nexus
is thought to be growing because terrorist groups act to take advantage of the money-raising
and movement strategies of criminal groups. Current strategies to map and combat threat
finance—criminal money laundering and terrorist financing—use the authorities of law
enforcement, intelligence operations, public designation, and international cooperation with
partner nations. Danielle Camner Lindholm and Celina B. Realuyo show how all of these
strategies are essential for fighting transnational organized crime.
The Attack on Sovereignty
Illicit networks, with their associated crime and violence, are undermining and co-opting whole
states, capturing the instruments of statecraft and state power to use for their own benefit. Several
authors in this book describe the causes and conditions that result in the loss of control by
legitimate governments. John P. Sullivan discusses “the reconfiguration of power within states”
and the impact of narcocultura. Fragile and consolidating states are at the greatest peril from the
growing efficacy of illicit networks. With weak state institutions and incompetent or corrupt
law enforcement organs, fragile and weak states often enjoy little support from their citizens.
The public goods that states should provide such as personal security, dispute resolution, financial
opportunity, and employment are as likely to be provided by cartels, gangs, militias, or
insurgencies as by weak or fragile states. In countries where economies are stagnant and unable
to provide gainful employment for burgeoning youth populations, illicit networks—that is,
the agents of deviant globalization—have arguably as great a claim on public loyalty as the
impotent state. As the state cannot ensure personal safety and public security, which instead
are provided by gangs, cartels, or militias, the exclusive legitimacy of the state’s use of coercive
force is dubious. In such cases, state sovereignty is supplanted by a different kind of legitimacy
heralding a new and likely less benign sociopolitical order.
States can also be destroyed from the inside. State corruption ranges from criminal penetration,
infiltration, capture, and, in the direst cases, state criminalization. Michael Miklaucic
and Moisés Naím seek to parse the varying degrees of criminalization of the state, while Vanda
Felbab-Brown examines how illicit networks are pushing Afghanistan toward criminalization.
In many cases, weak states may simply not have the ability to resist co-option by illicit organizations
and networks. In other cases, violent nonstate actors can become a de facto government
and provider of state services. In today’s world, there are growing numbers of illicit actors who
have money, economic influence, and the ability to deploy violence.
Global power has become multipolar. Indeed, power has diffused and devolved to a wide
range of nonstate actors within the global system and alongside the traditional holders of
power, the states. While some of those actors—for example, international nongovernmental organizations
and commercial enterprises—are undoubtedly quite comfortable working within
the international system of nation-states, others are less benign, and some are even dedicated to
overthrowing that system. Fighting this challenge to the state system is ever more daunting as
states come to terms with their limited and declining capabilities. In most states, government
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