convergence

Luna
domestic product. The wide availability of unregulated cash provides not only a safe haven and
exploitable sanctuaries for illicit forces, but also illicit liquidity for corrupt officials, criminals,
and terrorists to mingle, operate, and do business with, either with one another or on their own.
And too often, these criminal and illicit actors and networks are staging operations without
fear of reprisal from law enforcement.
Convergence defines the global economy today. The world we live in is one in which legal
business transactions and legitimate commerce both facilitate and feed off the illegal economy,
one in which illegal arms brokers and narcotics kingpins are acting in practice as the new chief
executive officers and venture capitalists. From Wall Street to other financial centers across
the globe, illicit networks are infiltrating and corrupting licit markets.
In this globalized, networked world, the uneven application of cross-border enforcement
enables illicit networks to arbitrage differences in regulatory policies to extract maximum illegal
profits. Policy levers activated in one country frequently have the undesired effect of driving
crime from that country into another where regulation and enforcement are less stringent.
The trade in illicit goods, people, arms, and services behaves much like a tide as it crosses
oceans, crashing around obstacles, seeking cracks in the levees, converging with other flows,
and flooding anywhere that is not protected.
From Sinaloa to Tirana to Caracas to Lagos, as transnational criminal organizations and
“third-generation gangs”—gangs that have morphed from local groups of individual actors to
cross-border, networked entities that toe the line between crime and war—increasingly forge
alliances with corrupt government officials, undermine competition in key global markets, and
diversify their illicit portfolios with ventures into legitimate commerce, they are unraveling the
social fabric of the community of nations.
It is therefore critical that the international community work together in a coordinated
manner to staunch this flow and dismantle the criminal opportunity structure at every node,
pipeline, and channel across the global illicit landscape. By combining forces in response
to the relentless convergence of illicit threat networks and reducing their ability to exploit
market opportunities, we will have a much greater chance of success if we target their center
of gravity in this landscape including their financial flows—the whole indeed can be greater
than the sum of all parts. Collective action can be harnessed via an array of responses to disassemble
today’s formidable criminal and terrorist adversaries by disrupting their pipelines
and ill-gotten financial assets. This chapter outlines some of the innovative approaches and
partnerships the U.S. State Department is developing to combat today’s illicit networks and
converging threats globally.
Translating Threat Awareness into Threat Management
The United States has recently taken steps to make countering the convergence of illicit threats
a national security priority. On July 25, 2011, the White House released the Strategy to Combat
Transnational Organized Crime: Addressing Converging Threats to National Security (SCTOC),
which aims to protect Americans and citizens of partner nations from violence and exploitation
at the hands of transnational criminal networks.
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