Illicit Economies and State(less) Geographies – The Politics of Illegality: A Commentary by Howard Campbell and Josiah Heyman

The relationship between states and illegal or illicit activities remains a relatively understudied social science subject in spite of its great cultural, political and economic importance. Drug matters epitomize the complexities of such relationships, which invariably take on spatial or international dimensions and have great consequences for socio-economic classes, ethnic groups and polities. To date, however, drug issues have mostly been considered in general terms (big picture public policy questions, public health questions, generalizations about criminal groups and insecurity, etc.). The articles in this Special Issue make important progress in exploring the immense complexity of combined drug-economy-state processes. HEYMAN and SMART’s (1999) pairing of states and illegal practices is a key starting point, because it neatly illustrates that what might appear as counterintuitive – connecting law and criminality – in fact constitutes the nexus we hope to understand in social science terms. But there is a need for deepening inquiries on both sides of this interconnected binary – more complex and processual views of states, and more complex and processual views of practices (illegal, grey, and legal), and then interactions between them, the processes of processes as it were. For example, criminal organizations are often complex networks with some patches of tight cohesion and organizing activities extending out from them, but they are more fluid across space and time than are states. Yet like states, their activities are often covert, occluded or disguised. Concerning states, official legality and bureaucracy is actively projected on the surface, but behind it there is a complex politics of power and governance, as well as capture of rents, through various forms of cooperation with illegal practices (corruption, toleration, selective prosecution, etc.). More subtle, but highly important in shaping space and society, are processes of mutual adaptation/reinforcement/symbiosis between illegal markets and criminal organizations, and enforcement arms of states and other state elements, such as taxation, and electoral politics. In such cases, they appear to be in opposition – often involving terrible coercion – but also feeding each other’s growth, sophistication, authority, secrecy, violent capacities, and so forth. The fine papers gathered in this volume, written by rising scholars of considerable proficiency, address issues arising from the nexus of states and illegality. AGNEW (2015) applies the concept of the “balloon effect” – where pressure on illegal flows in one