Illicit markets and violence: what is the relationship?

Illicit global markets, such as the smuggling of people and goods across borders, share some core characteristics: They are unauthorized by the sending and/or receiving jurisdiction and they operate via mechanisms designed to evade detection and apprehension. These illicit market activities are also widely believed to be closely associated with the global spread of organized violence. Indeed, violence is commonly viewed as one of the defining features of illicit markets that differentiate them from licit markets. The most popular narrative of the relationship between illicit global markets and violence is seductively simple: As criminal enterprise has gone global, so too has the violence closely associated with it. This is an important part of the storyline, for example, in recent popular books such as Moises Naim’s Illicit and Misha Glenny’s McMafia. These provocative accounts of the dark underside of globalization— ruthless globe-trotting and gun-wielding criminal syndicates—generate fear and anxiety and fuel public support for more intensive international crime-control campaigns. Illicit economic activities that don’t cross borders, such as local markets in illegal or stolen commodities, are similarly at risk of interdiction by agencies of government. And, as with illicit cross-border flows, these markets are thought to be rife with violence involving, in varying combinations, those who make their living in them, customers who only partake of their goods, authorities whose job it is to suppress them, and innocent victims who belong to none of these categories. To be sure, despite the highly variable degree to which illicit markets are violent, as we discuss below, it is safe to assert that, on the whole, these markets are more prone to violence than markets in the legitimate economy. The explanation for this, stated in slightly varying versions in the articles that follow, is that illicit markets, by Crime Law Soc Change (2009) 52:225–229 DOI 10.1007/s10611-009-9200-6