Networks of Criminality: the State and Crime Policy in Contemporary Democracy. - Vol. 28 Núm. 2, Julio 2016 - Revista Desafíos - Libros y Revistas - VLEX 652565009

Networks of Criminality: the State and Crime Policy in Contemporary Democracy.

AutorUngar, Mark
CargoEnsayo
Páginas299(33)

La Red de Criminalidad: El Estado y las Politicas de Seguridad en America

A Rede de Criminalidade: O Estado e as Politicas de Seguranca na America

Introduction: A New Theoretical Framework

Despite steady economic and political progress, criminality is one of the few common afflictions among the world's otherwise divergent regimes. To tackle it, officials throughout the world have reformed their security sectors with more decentralization, judicial oversight, or community-oriented policing. But even the most carefully crafted change is undermined by obstacles such as public pressure for short-term results. Scholarship discusses why such impediments make crime more impervious to reform than most other issues. It has not yet, however, delved into the deeper malady from which it derives. Criminality is persistent and ingrained, this article asserts, because it is rooted in a network of security providers that is intrinsic to state and regime development. This network responds more to the exchange of goods--money, information, and power--than to the public good. The results are not just more crime, but injustice, corruption, and other ills that fuel it and make it harder for democracies to curb it. This network has both vertical depth and horizontal spread: it is woven into the historical development of institutions, and in the current era has an unprecedented global span.

Drawing on the experience of Latin America and building on two areas of scholarship--state/regime development and network analysis--this article formulates a theoretical framework to more deeply explain criminality's nature, persistence, and resistance to reform. It argues that because these networks are engrained into the essence and evolution of the state and regimes, criminality is built into most of the world's democracies, which then struggle to disentangle themselves from it. The first section of this article outlines this framework in greater detail. The main components of this network and framework, described in the second section, are the three main networks of security providers: officials who form security policy; the criminal justice system that handles crime; and the set of non-state armed actors. Together, these three overlapping networks form a lattice of corruption, crime, violence, and insecurity. To apply this framework, the article will then examine how these networks erode policies designed to reduce crime. It will cover two main areas of such policies: against illegal trafficked goods, with a focus on firearms; and overall crime in a country, with a focus on the case study of Honduras. This model, in short, will be applied by showing how it weakens a policy intended to weaken crime.

State and Regime Evolution

State Formation: Criminality's contemporary manifestations, from institutional weaknesses to narcotrafficking, have been the focus of many explanatory frameworks. One set of frameworks centers on the state and its formation, highlighting the violence with which states are built. State scholars like Moore (1993), for example, cite the violence they use to balance external and internal pressures. Tilly, most relevantly, sees state-making itself as analogous to organized crime (hereafter OC), since both are led by "coercive and self-seeking entrepreneurs" who best others in extracting resources, accumulating capital, and providing "protection." (1985, p. 169). They skillfully mobilize armed groups to wage war or seize territory, and then either disband or outlaw those that became a threat or outlive their purpose. Those that remain useful are integrated into the state as police or military; to paraphrase Thomson (1994), bandits became troops and pirates became sailors. That process continues as states and regimes themselves continue to evolve. For example, in June 2016 an investigation into the ousted President of Guatemala revealed that his entire political party was a network of bribery, favoritism, and kickbacks that gained power and wealth through connections to a network of wealthy private actors. (Associated Press, 2016)

Regimes: This history was led by dictatorial regimes, of course, since political repression goes well with violent criminality. Democracy should be the most effective way to finally end this pattern, considering it is the only regime type centered on rule of law measures to curb criminality. But the transition literature, of course, has shown that contemporary democracy has not yet realized that goal. Even though more countries have formally adopted democracy than at any other time in history, they have yet to ensure electoral freedom, media independence, and its other essential elements--many measured with "metrics" like political prisoners or stolen votes-. A democracy depends on the state to implement its rules and policies, that is, but those states have not yet shed their violent attributes. States continue to develop along with democracies, and in many cases, with their historical head start, taking the lead.

Criminality is ingrained in this intertwined process of democratization and state formation. From Southeast Asia to West Africa, nascent democracies are consumed by crime in part because they have become not the master of, but a shell for it. When that violence is driven primarily by transnational networks, the result is often a "mafia state," run by officials who "become integral players in, if not the leaders of, criminal enterprises" whose goals become "official priorities." (Naim, 2012). While the levels control vary, the number of states succumbing to this capture are numerous, and include not just obviously weak or roguish states (e.g. Afghanistan, Guinea-Bissau, Paraguay, and Suriname), but the vast range of countries struggling through democratization (e.g. Burma, El Salvador, and Albania). In Bulgaria, for example, OC has grown rich "from drugs, smuggling, and prostitution, has merged with corporations" with "privatized state-owned assets, or has transformed its accumulated wealth into political and administrative power" (Gounev & Bezlov 2010, p. 203). Around the world, in short, the increasing range and persistence of groups committing crime--from local gangs to global cartels--do not just stall democracy. They also challenge the Weberian state's "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Democracy may be necessary for security, but it is far from sufficient.

Networks: A second analytical framework, drawn mostly from criminology, is used to study networks, ranging from urban youth to international business. Such networks are often mapped through social network analysis (SNA), centered on the nature, number, distance, and links among a network's elements. More exponential networks have nodes with similar number of links, for example, while scale-free networks like transportation systems center on a small number of nodes (the hubs) with many. SNA also focuses on the embeddedness of network nodes in society, as well as the muliplexity of their connections. Al Capone's mutually-supporting criminal, personal, and legitimate networks demonstrate such features (Baker & Faulkner, 2009; Kadushin, 2012; Papachristos & Smith, 2014). Like systems theory, SNA further shows how relations among nodes shift in response to underlying asymmetries or external pressures (Kessler, 2004; Morcol, 2012; Paoli, 2004).

SNA's applicability is often most dynamic when applied to the market sphere. No matter their stage of transition, every contemporary democracy is embedded in a global market economy that their under-developed state structures struggle to navigate and regulate. Growing crime has made security one of the fastest-growing of those markets, as seen by an astronomical growth in private security firms. Another fast-growing but less documented non-state sphere is of entities providing security illicitly, such as rural militias, vigilante squads, business guards, errant community policing groups, and others that thrive where the state is weak. Many of these groups are connected to organized crime, from gangs to narco-traffickers and other organizations that dominate security in areas under their sway. In the current era of great technological and political change, as studies show, OC shed some of the constraining traits attributed to it in much of the literature, such as being monopolistic and hierarchal (Abedinsky, 2010). Since syndicates adopt the most profitable tactics--constantly splintering and collaborating as they identify and seize new opportunities--typologies increasingly conceive of them as a range of activities or a continuum of behaviors (Maltz, 1976; Hagan, 2010) rather than as structured organizations (Smith, 1980). This emerging SNA approach has important policy applications. Since more exponential networks better absorb external pressures, for example, a lesson Mexican cartels like Sinaloa successfully drew from their more hierarchal predecessors in Colombia was to adopt more decentralized, multi-spoked networks. As studies show, the current era's unprecedented levels of communications, movement, and access have created perhaps history's most hospitable environment for such networks. At the local level, OC is strengthened by inroads into community politics, economies, and public legitimacy facilitated by local security providers discussed above, from state police to private militias. In rural areas, for example, illegal mining and logging operations have built roads and scouted out exploration for larger global firms. Organized crime is still organized, but in ways that attach to, rather than set it apart from, the state. Networks connect providers of security, from executive policymakers at the center of the state to transnational syndicates on its far reaches, and the informal entities in between.

A new Analytical Framewor: The article's analytical framework brings these two areas together: how the networks of security providers...

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