Controlling the Shadow Trade

Abstract

From tackling illicit flows of small arms to combating nuclear smuggling, the shadow trade has become a central target of attempts to control the means of violence. This article argues that much of this practice and literature is framed in unhelpful terms that posit two distinct worlds, an upperworld and underworld, that separates illicit flow networks from the familiar world of state security policy. This implies that the possibilities for controlling the shadow trade are limited or require expansive and expensive controls. The article then examines the formation of illicit flow networks, drawing on examples including narcotics, small arms, nuclear materials, nuclear technology, major conventional arms, dual use technologies, and chemical weapons precursors; and finds that state and hybrid actors rather than extensive private networks are constitutive of illicit networks in many ways. It concludes by reclaiming hope for controlling the means of violence in this hybridity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Neil Cooper and participants at the international workshop ‘Arms Control for the 21st Century,’ 22–23 January 2010, York University, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for comments on a subsequent draft of this article.

Notes

Katja Franko Aas, ‘Analysing a World in Motion: Global Flows Meet ‘Criminology of the Other’, Theoretical Criminology, Vol.11, No.2 (May 2007), pp.283–303.

Neil Cooper, ‘From Motherhood and Apple Pie to UAVs in Afghanistan: Humanitarian Arms Control, NGOs and the Strategic Complexes of the Liberal Peace’ in Jackie Smith and Ernesto Verdeja (eds), Globalization, Peacebuilding and Social Movements, forthcoming (2011).

David Mutimer, The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing of Security (London: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1540, 28 April 2004, S/RES/1540 (2004).

United Nations General Assembly, Protocol against the Illicit Manufacturing of and Trafficking in Firearms, their Parts and Components and Ammunition, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, UN Document A/RES/55/255, 8 June 2001, p. 4.

Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, ‘Introduction: The Making of Illicitness’, in Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel (eds), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp.1–37.

H. Richard Friman, ‘Externalizing the Costs of Prohibition’, in H. Richard Friman (ed.), Crime and the Global Political Economy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2010), pp.49–66.

Neil Cooper. ‘Putting Disarmament Back in the Frame’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 32, No.2, (2006), pp.353–76, pp370–1.

Ibid.

Neil Cooper, ‘From Motherhood and Apple Pie to UAVs in Afghanistan’ (note 2).

US Department of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report (Washington, DC: US Department of Defense, 2010), p.3.

Aaron Karp ‘The Changing Ownership of War: States, Insurgencies and Technology’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No. 2, (August 2009), pp.375–94; Diane Davis, ‘Non-State Armed Actors, New Imagined Communities, and Shifting Patterns of Sovereignty and Insecurity in the Modern World’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 30, No. 2 (August 2009), pp.221–45.

John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt ‘The Advent of Netwar (Revisited)’, in John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (eds), Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation), pp.1–25, p.1.

Moises Naim, ILLICIT: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (London: William Heinemann, 2005); and Kimberley L. Thachuk (ed.), Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life (Westport, CI: Praeger Security International, 2007).

Chaim Braun and Christopher F. Chyba, ‘Proliferation Rings: New Challenges to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime’, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall 2004), pp.5–49; Alexander H. Montgomery, ‘Proliferation Networks in Theory and Practice’, Strategic Insights, Vol. V, No. 6 (July 2006), at: http://www.nps.edu/Academics/centers/ccc/publications/OnlineJournal/2006/Jul/montgomeryJul06.html

James A. Russell, ‘Peering into the Abyss: Non-State Actors and the 2016 Proliferation Environment’, Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (November 2006), pp.645–57.

Ibid., p.648.

Louise Shelley, John Picarelli, and Chris Corpora, ‘Global Crime Inc.’, in Maryann Cusmano (ed.), Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a Global Agenda: Second Edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2003), pp.143–66.

Davis, ‘Non-State Armed Actors’ (note 12).

Russell, ‘Peering into the abyss’ (note 16).

Iraq Intelligence Commission, The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction: Unclassified Report of the President of the United States, March 31, 2005, at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/wmd/pdf/full_wmd_report.pdf

United Nations Security Council, Resolution 1540 (note 4).

See http://www.stimson.org/proliferation-security-initiative-/#text19

Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Miles Kahler, and Alexander H. Montgomery, ‘Network Analysis for International Relations’, International Organization, Vol. 63, No. 3 (Summer 2009), pp.559–92; David Kinsella, ‘The Black Market in Small Arms: Examining a Social Network’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 27, No. 1 (April 2006), pp.100–17; Alexander H. Montgomery, ‘Ringing in Proliferation: How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb Network’, International Security, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Fall 2005), pp.153–87.

Phil Williams, ‘Transnational Criminal Networks’, in Arquilla and Ronfeldt (eds), Networks and Netwars, (note 13), pp.61–97, pp.77–8.

Mark Bromley and Hugh Griffiths, ‘End-User Certificates: Improving Standards to Prevent Diversion’, in SIPRI Insights on Peace and Security, No. 2010/3, (Stockholm: SIPRI, 2010); Hugh Griffiths and Adrian Wilkinson, Guns, Planes and Ships: Identification and Disruption of Clandestine Arms Transfers (Belgrade, SEESAC, 2007); Matt Schroeder et al., ‘Deadly Deception: Arms Transfer Diversion’, in Eric Berman et al. (eds), Small Arms Survey 2008: Risk and Resilience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.113–53.

Directorate of Defence Trade Controls, End-Use Monitoring of Defense Articles and Defense Services Commercial Exports FY 2007 (Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2007), at: http://pmddtc.state.gov/reports/enduse_reports.html

Schroeder, et al., ‘Deadly Deception’ (note 22), pp.141–6.

IAEA, ‘Nuclear Security Culture: Implementing Guide’, in IAEA Nuclear Security Series No. 7 (Vienna: IAEA, 2008), p.3, p.20. Emphasis added.

Petrus C. Van Duyn, ‘Serving the Integrity of the Mammon and the Compulsive Excessive Regulatory Disorder’, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 52, No.1 (July 2009), pp.1–8; Antoinette Verhage, ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil? The Anti-Money Laundering-Complex and its Interactions with the Compliance Industry’, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 52, No.1 (July 2009), pp.9–32.

For an analysis that assumes that they do, see Christine Jojarth, Crime, War and Global Trafficking: Designing International Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

US Government Accountability Office (GAO), SUPPLY CHAIN SECURITY: Feasibility and Cost-Benefit Analysis Would Assist DHS and Congress in Assessing and Implementing the Requirement to Scan 100 per cent of U.S. Bound Containers (Washington, DC: US GAO, 2009).

Zachary Johnson, ‘UN Aviation Agency Seeks to Combat WMD Trafficking’, NTI Issue Brief (April 2010), at: http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_un_aviation_agency_combat_wmd_trafficking.html#fn26

Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, Ship Boarding Agreements (Washington, DC: US Department of State, no date given), at: http://www.state.gov/t/isn/c27733.htm

US Customs and Border Protection, Container Security Initiative Strategic Plan 2006–2011 (Washington, DC: US Customs and Border Protection, 2006), p.37, at: http://www.cbp.gov/xp/cgov/trade/cargo_security/csi/

FATF, FATF Report: Combating Proliferation Financing: A Status Report on Policy Development and Consultation (Paris: Financial Action Task Force, 2010).

Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars (note 13), pp.8–9.

Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Calvert Jones, ‘Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks: Why al-Qaida May be Less Threatening than Many Think’, International Security, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall 2008), pp.7–44.

Montgomery, Ringing in Proliferation (note 20).

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Jones, ‘Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks’ (note 38), p.42.

For a similar argument on nuclear terrorism see Michael Levi, On Nuclear Terrorism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp.7–8.

Maria Haug, ‘Crime, Conflict, Corruption: Global Illicit Small Arms Transfers’, in Peter Batchelor and Keith Krause (eds), Small Arms Survey 2001: Profiling the Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp.165–95; Aaron Karp, ‘The Rise of Black and Gray Markets’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 535, No. 1 (September 1994), pp.175–89; Lucy Mathiak and Lora Lumpe, ‘Government Gun-running to Guerrillas’, in Lora Lumpe (ed.), Running Guns: The Global Black Market in Small Arms (London: Zed, 2000), pp.55–80.

David Mutimer, ‘A Serious Threat to Peace, Reconciliation, Safety, Security: An Effective Reading of the United Nations Programme of Action’, Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 27, No. 1 (April 2006), pp.29–44.

By Social Life of a gun I mean the changing status and values attached to the gun as a ‘thing’. See Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Matthew Bunn, ‘Corruption and Nuclear Proliferation’, in Robert I. Rotberg (ed.), Corruption, Security, and World Order (Baltimore, MD: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), pp.124–66.

Abraham and van Schendel, ‘Introduction: The Making of Illicitness’ (note 6), p.8.

Nikos Passas, ‘Cross-Border Crime and the Interface between Legal and Illegal Actors’, in Petrus C. van Duyne, Klaus von Lampe, and Nikos Passas (eds), Upperworld and Underworld in Cross-Border Crime (Nijmegen: Wolf Legal Publishers, 2002), pp.11–42.

John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

David Albright, Kate Buelher, and Corey Hinderstein, Case studies of Illicit Procurement Networks (Washington, DC: Institute for Science and International Security, 2003), at: http://www.exportcontrols.org/recruitment.html#offshore

Jonathan B. Tucker, ‘Trafficking Networks for Chemical Weapons Precursors: Lessons from the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s’, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies Occasional Papers, No.13 (Monterrey: Monterrey Institute of International Studies, 2008), p.6.

Passas, ‘Cross-border crime’ (note 47), p.19.

Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

Mark Phythian, ‘The Illicit Arms Trade: Cold War and Post-Cold War’, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 33, No. 1–2 (March 2000), pp.1–52, pp.37–40.

Cooper, ‘From Motherhood and Apple Pie to UAVs in Afghanistan’ (note 2).

Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

Alfred W. McCoy, ‘Requiem for a Drug Lord: State and Commodity in the Career of Khun Sa’, in Josiah Heyman (ed.), States and Illegal Practices (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp.129–68.

Letizia Paoli, Victoria A. Greenfield, and Peter Reuter, The World Heroin Market: Can Supply be Cut? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p.221.

Ibid.; Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, Colombia (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003).

Jonathan Goodhand, ‘Corrupting or Consolidating the Peace? The Drugs Economy and Post-Conflict Peacebuilding in Afghanistan’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2008), pp.405–23, p.409.

Phil Williams, ‘Organized Crime and Corruption in Iraq’, International Peacekeeping, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2009), pp.115–35, p.122.

Brian Wood, ‘International Initiatives to Prevent Illicit Brokering of Arms and Related Materials’, Disarmament Forum, No.3 (2009), pp.5–16; UN General Assembly, Resolution 63/67: Preventing and combating illicit brokering activities, A/RES/63/67 (New York: United Nations, 12 January 2009).

Mike Bourne, Arming Conflict: The Proliferation of Small Arms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007).

Ibid., pp.143–56.

United Nations, Report of the Panel of Experts established pursuant to paragraph 3 of resolution 1591 (2005) concerning the Sudan, S/2006/65 (New York: United Nations, 2006).

Stephen Ellis, ‘Liberia's Warlord Insurgency’, in Christopher Clapham (ed.), African Guerillas (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), pp.155–71, p.160–6; Abdel Fatau Musah, ‘Small Arms and Conflict Transformation in West Africa’, in Abdel Fatau Musah and Niobe Thompson (eds), Over a Barrel: Light Weapons & Human Rights in the Commonwealth (London: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 1999) pp.108–39; William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (London: Lynne Rienner, 1999), p.97.

Bourne, Arming Conflict (note 58).

United Nations, Report of the Panel of Experts pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1343 (2001), paragraph 19, concerning Liberia, S/2001/1015 (New York: United Nations, 2001), p.47.

Mark Phythian, ‘The Illicit Arms Trade’ (note 53).

Human Rights Watch, Rearming with Impunity: International Support for the Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 1995), p.11.

Tara Kartha, ‘Organised Crime and the Illegal Market in Weapons in Southern Asia’, Strategic Analysis, Vol.XXIV, No.2 (May 2000), pp.403–22.

Bourne, Arming Conflict, (note 62).

Julian Borger, ‘Iraq Rearming for War, Say Defectors: Baghdad Buying up East European Weapons’, The Guardian, 29 April 2002, at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/apr/29/iraq.julianborger

Russell, Peering into the Abyss (note 16), pp.651–2, p.655.

Jack Boureston and James A. Russell, ‘Illicit Nuclear Procurement Networks and Nuclear Proliferation: Challenges for Intelligence, Detection, and Interdiction’, STAIR (St. Antony's International Review), Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2009), pp.24–50, p.41.

Bourne, Arming Conflict (note 62), pp.224–7.

Peter Chalk ‘The Tamil Tiger Insurgency in Sri Lanka’, in Musah and Thompson (eds), Over a Barrel (note 65), pp.64–91, pp.79–82; Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaida (London: Hurst and Company, 2002), pp.58–60; Phythian, ‘The illicit arms trade’ (note 53), p.18.

Bourne, Arming Conflict (note 62), pp.224–7.

Ibid.

Timothy W. Luke, ‘The Discipline of Security Studies and the Codes of Containment: Learning from Kuwait’, Alternatives, Vol.16, No.3 (Spring 1991), pp.315–44.

Sir Thomas Legg and Sir Robin Ibbs, Report of the Sierra Leone Arms Investigation (London: The Stationary Office, 1998).

Julia Buxton, The Political Economy of Narcotics: Production, Consumption, & Global Markets (London: Zed Books, 2006), pp.97–8.

Raphael F. Perl, ‘State Crime: The North Korean Drug Trade’, in Mark Galeotti (ed.), Global Crime Today: The Changing Face of Organised Crime (London: Routledge, 2005), pp.117– 28.

Paoli, Greenfield and Reuter, The World Heroin Market (note 57), p.221.

Goodhand, Corrupting or Consolidating the Peace (note 59).

‘US Names Bissau ‘Drug Kingpins’, BBC News, 9 April 2010, at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/8610924.stm; and Stephen Ellis, ‘West Africa's International Drug Trade’, African Affairs, Vol. 108, No. 431 (2009), pp.171–96.

Robin M. Frost, Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11 (London: IISS, 2005); Lyudmila Zaitseva and Kevin Hand, ‘Nuclear Smuggling Chains: Suppliers, Intermediaries, and End-Users’, American Behavioural Scientist, Vol. 46, No. 6 (2003), pp.822–844.

Rensselaer Lee, Smuggling Armageddon: The Nuclear Black Market in the Former Soviet Union and Europe (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998), pp.59–72.

Mark Fitzpatrick (ed.), Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A.Q. Khan and the Rise of Proliferation Networks – A Net Assessment (London, IISS, 2007), pp.132–3; Lyudmila Zaitseva, ‘Organized Crime, Terrorism and Nuclear Trafficking’, Strategic Insights, Vol. VI, No. 5, (August 2007), at: http://www.nps.edu/Academics/centers/ccc/publications/OnlineJournal/2007/Aug/zaitsevaAug07.pdf

Bunn, ‘Corruption and Nuclear Proliferation’ (note 45), p.139.

Zaitseva and Hand, ‘Nuclear Smuggling Chains’ (note 86).

Williams, ‘Transnational Criminal Networks’ (note 25); Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Jones, ‘Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks’ (note 38).

Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.12.

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley, ‘Nuclear Terrorism's Fatal Assumptions’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 22 October 2007, at: http://www.thebulletin.org/node/203

Fitzpatrick (ed.), Nuclear Black Markets (note 88), pp.129–31.

Bourne, Arming Conflict (note 62).

Ibid.

Buxton, The Political Economy of Narcotics (note 81), p.85.

Cornelius Friesendorf, ‘Squeezing the balloon? United States Air Interdiction and the Restructuring of the South American Drug Industry in the 1990s’, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 44, No. 1 (August 2005), pp.35–78.

Louise Shelley, ‘Trafficking in Nuclear Materials: Criminals and Terrorists’, Global Crime, Vol. 7, Nos 3–4 (August 2006), pp.544–60, p.544.

Rensselaer Lee, ‘Nuclear Smuggling, Rogue States and Terrorists’, China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2006), pp.25–32, p.29.

Lyudmila Zaitseva, ‘Illicit Trafficking in the Southern Tier and Turkey since 1999: A Shift from Europe?’, The Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall and Winter 2002), pp.168–82.

Tucker, Trafficking Networks (note 50), p.8.

Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Jones, ‘Assessing the Dangers of Illicit Networks’ (note 39), p.29.

Bourne, Arming Conflict (note 62); Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001), pp.176–7; Robert H. Jackson, Quasi–states: sovereignty, international relations and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Reno, Warlord Politics (note 65), pp.221–2.

William Hartung, And Weapons for All: How America's Multibillion-Dollar Arms Trade Warps our Foreign Policy and Subverts Democracy at Home (New York: Harper Perrenial, 1995).

Peter Andreas, ‘Criminalizing Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and its Legacy’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 2 (June 2005), pp.335–60.

I am grateful to Neil Cooper for this point. Justin McCurry, ‘North Korea is “Exporting Nuclear Technology”’, The Guardian, 28 May 2010, at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/28/north-korea-exporting-nuclear-technology

Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.178–81.

Montgomery, ‘Ringing in Proliferation’ (note 24).