THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ORGANIZED CRIME AND STATE FAILURE: THE NEXUS OF GREED, NEED AND GRIEVANCE

State failure has emerged as a new security threat, however its dynamics are poorly understood as evidenced by our limited insight of its relationship to proximate causes such as organized crime. Most theories of conflict and state failure that incorporate organized crime focus on its ability to finance war and provide economic incentives to sustain instability; however, they ignore the political elements that are present in theories of organized crime. Moreover, it is difficult to discern the difference between crime as a symptom of state failure and crime as an agent of it. The central question posed in this paper concerns how organized crime interacts with the causes of state failure. Applying a political economy analysis to the drug trade in Afghanistan and Tajikistan as case studies, the purpose of the study is to determine whether or not organized crime is a neutral symptom of state failure or if it contributes to the process of disintegration. The findings reveal that organized crime serves as a proximate cause of state failure by feeding off of and reinforcing other causes in a manner that propels weak states towards failure and provides obstacles to the re-establishment of a functional state. This suggests that policy-makers should also approach the problem from a political economy perspective, taking care to isolate the greed aspect of organized crime without exacerbating the legitimate need and grievances of citizens that it exploits and seeks to reinforce. To do so requires an expansion of the traditional toolbox for conflict management beyond traditional military and development instruments to include intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.