Transnational organized crimeits nature and threats to peace

Resumen

This thesis analyses the nature and threats to peace represented by Transnational Organized Crime (TOC). Considering that TOC is an important power agent in a fast shifting world, a social constructivist version of the theory of structural power has been employed as the theoretical framework to study it, based mainly on Susan Strange and Robert Cox. It was also analysed from a critical IPE and multidisciplinary perspective. This has facilitated an analysis of the ideas, institutions and material capabilities of TOC within the power structures and their interrelations. Based on the principle of the harms caused by TOC instead of the traditional law, the study considers three categories of TOC: the traditional type which includes mainly the illegal trafficking of commodities and racketeering; the economic type which includes corruption, fraud, illicit financial flows, tax evasion and money laundering; the environmental type which includes serious harms to the biosphere, as climate change and biodiversity destruction. Although these harms represent a major threat to humanity and the planet, most of them have not yet been criminalized, some because they are new phenomena, but most because the elites involved in them prevent it. The information about TOC is scarce because of its clandestine and secretive nature, but also because the elites connected to it inhibit the disclosure of information in the media and the financing of academic research on TOC. Thus TOC represents a major threat to direct, structural and cultural peace. It is a peril to international peace, to human rights and to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). TOC is facilitated by bad governance: excessive securitization (drug trafficking), weak control (failed states, borders, high seas, arms trafficking), de-regulation (money laundering, tax evasion, fraud) or procrastination (climate change). Traditional TOC has an origin similar to that of the state, and has a conspicuous role in the ‘new wars’, the main difference being that the former’s goal is profit, while the latter’s should be the welfare of the population. Economic and environmental TOC are embedded in the state system through the elites that control both. TOC is essentially a market activity, and the lines between legal and illegal business are being blurred in the neoliberal context. Civil society is highly engaged in combatting TOC, as are some NGOs and religious leaders, but others like the corporate media are ready to cooperate with TOC for profit. Despite the proliferation of international regimes promoted by the liberal ideology in the last decades, its efficiency in controlling TOC is limited. This thesis supports the promotion of a cosmopolitan governance system that would control the ungoverned spaces in coordination with the states.