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Text Box: Adam Edwards(1) Nottingham Trent University The perceived threat of ‘Transnational Organised Crime’ (TOC) has become an issue of acute interest to politicians, policy-makers and social scientists in the last decade, yet there is little consensus over the character, or even the existence, of this purported threat. Critics account for the increasing salience of TOC in terms of the need for military, security and intelligence agencies to reinvent their roles in a post-Cold War ‘new world order’. They argue that the scope of organised crime remains contained within local territories and should be controlled through a combination of local crime control and social policy interventions. Conversely, others acknowledge the ‘reality’ of TOC and the increasing mobility and sophistication of criminal entrepreneurs. They identify an emerging ‘global crime problem’, enabled by rapid developments in information and transport technologies and an increasingly de-regulated global economy. In turn they argue for greater investment in international law enforcement including the provision of extraordinary powers for intrusive surveillance. The following review of preliminary findings emerging from an ongoing research seminar series on ‘Policy Responses to Transnational Organised Crime’ funded by the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council confirms that, far from there being a broad consensus over the character or existence of TOC, this whole policy field is the subject of vigorous and controversial debate. The principal lesson emerging from this series is the need to adopt an open-ended approach to the ‘threat’ of organised crime in which commentators should experiment with alternative conceptions, etiological accounts and policy measures beyond the conventional preoccupation with law enforcement. At the time of writing, the Series is half way through its 6 scheduled meetings. Hitherto, 12 papers have been presented and what follows is an interim report on key themes and findings emerging from the meetings of the Seminar and the key thinkers who have informed the Seminar discussions. The findings can be grouped into three basic themes: (i) the scope of transnational organised crime; (ii) the focus of policy debates about transnational organised crime; and (iii) implications for research and policy reform.

Text Box: THE SCOPE OF TOC This theme refers to the collection and interpretation of evidence on the patterns of TOC. It questions the incidence, prevalence and concentration of TOC. Within this theme findings can be summarised in terms of three interrelated tensions: the global versus local scope of organised crime; the external versus internal threat of organised crime; and the relations between licit and illicit markets and ‘entrepreneurs’. Global versus local: The purported process of globalisation and its consequences for (inter-)national security animates much of the discussion about organised crime. In the ‘global village’ criminal organisations exploit opportunities for cross-border crime generated by, inter alia: the construction of continental trading blocs such as the North American Free Trade Association and the European Union; developments in communications and transport technologies; and increasingly de-regulated international currency markets. The knowledge-base for the emergence of a ‘global crime problem’ is premised on two basic measures: (a) The volume of organised crime; and (b) Intelligence reports on the activities of particular criminal organisations/individuals (Gregory, 1998). Volume measures typically focus on arrest rates, asset seizures and the estimated costs of specific crime problems(3). Global measures of organised crime are provided by Interpol using estimates of profit turnover based on, for example, the production of drugs in metric tons and the distributor price of a particular drug per kilo. On this basis it is estimated that the annual turnover of illicit drugs traffic as $500 billion (Gregory, 1998: 135). Conversely, in questioning the very existence of TOC, Hobbs (1998a,b; 2000) argues that as far as the British experience goes there has been a conspicuous failure to demonstrate the operation of offenders which fit the Hollywood image of ethnically-based, hierarchically structured, ‘mafia’ that orchestrate transnational operations like some ‘shadow’ multinational corporation. Instead, Hobbs reverses the logic of globalisation found in official narratives to demonstrate how this actually emphasises locality rather than transnationality in the form of organised criminal relations. Serious crime problems, as he prefers to call them, are only ever experienced locally. What is new in the character of these problems is the emergence of

Text Box: Understanding Transnational Crime & Criminality: Policy Responses to Transnational Organised Crime

Critical Criminologist