The world is movement. People migrate in response to labor needs and human disaster; money and memes flit between countries, and people move almost too quickly to track; the flow of energy and commodities bind consumers to providers in supply chains that neither party can usually envisage. Needless to say, this is as true of criminal activities as any other sphere of human endeavor, especially when it comes to trafficking drugs. According to the United Nations, as of 2010 the trade in opiates generates an annual turnover of up to $65 billion, with cocaine accounting for a further $88 billion. The crudest street gang peddling crack or heroin in a darkened stairwell is part of a complex transnational business, even if its members scarcely know from which country their product originally hails. The roaring torrents of Afghan opiates and Latin American cocaine crash through border checkpoints, leaving corrupted customs officers and pipelines for other illicit transfers in their wake, hollow out political systems, and transform into equally powerful flows of dirty money that in due course wash into every banking system in the world.

These four books under review, each in its own way, address two fundamental questions: How can we understand the challenge of globalized criminality, and what can we—locally, nationally, globally—do about it? The bad news is that the spread of global crime in general, and in particular the trafficking of narcotics, is proving extremely difficult to combat, not least as governments concentrate on more politically palatable campaigns against producers and traffickers abroad and on their borders, rather than addressing the market for the drugs themselves at home. But the good news is that the scholarship is developing at a rapid pace and increasingly lending itself to informed policy—as soon, needless to say, as policymakers want to listen.

In the process, the study of global crime also speaks to wider political science debates. There is scarcely a global challenge in which crime does not have a serious and substantive impact, from international efforts to combat terrorism and genocide (the perpetrators of which often turn to crime to fund their operations) to the struggle against climate change (which has generated a new underworld market in toxic waste and chlorofluorocarbons). What price sanctions, when Pyongyang seeks to keep its economy afloat through the industrial-scale counterfeiting and amphetamine-trafficking run by its infamous Bureau 39? And how does this affect the conventional wisdom on the ways to influence states by enforcing or promoting international norms? Given that in many cases states or at least significant elements of national elites are complicit in criminality, should organized crime simply be considered another powerful lobby, alongside multinationals and unions? A key issue within the neoliberal institutionalist model and regime theory in general is the impact of, and impulses behind, the rise of international regimes. Considering that most narcotics are produced in poor countries and consumed in rich ones, are transnational institutions that are developed to prevent drug trafficking truly expressions of global consensus or simply instruments that seek to protect the interests of the latter? Or do they, in practice, often reflect domestic power struggles as elites lacking access to drug revenues seek to undermine those who do, whether rival clans or insurgents? Besides, how easy is it for states to be transparent about their compliance when the activities in question are by definition covert and illegal?

The study of crime from a political science rather than criminological perspective is central to H. Richard Friman's edited collection, Crime and the Global Political Economy. It is the broadest of the works covered here and, as is so often the case, this is at once both a strength and a weakness. Friman has assembled an interesting and impressive range of contributors, including Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann on the internationalization of crime control, John Picarelli on human trafficking, and Monica Serrano on the impact of drug trafficking on Mexico; as a result there is much here that is important and worth reading. William Reno's chapter on “Illicit Commerce in Peripheral States” beautifully illuminates the wider context of developments in West Africa and the extent to which external actors, from governments to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), may cooperate with criminals for their own often (but not always) laudable ends.

Although Friman's agenda is to make a case for “theoretically informed work in crime grounded in the field of international political economy” (p. 17), and his introduction makes a valiant job of connecting the contributions, such a theoretical grounding is not very well developed in the volume as a whole. His introductory chapter is a first-class encapsulation of the ways that the study of crime can fit within the international political economy literature. Conversely, James Mittelman's closing rumination on “Social Research, Knowledge and Criminal Power” is a wide-ranging review of literature and philosophies of research that, while setting itself the task of inquiring “into ways to come to grips with the political economy of global crime” (p. 159), all too often seems more concerned with critiquing existing studies and approaches on the basis of caricature. Mittelman presents what he describes as his own “five-point program of historicism, Otherness, war and peace, global space, and resistance” as the basis for “an advanced research agenda” and wonders “why has the wider vision of global crime studies not been adopted before?” (p. 174). In the process, though, he traduces not just many within the field but even a number of contributors to the book, who often provide wide-ranging and soundly based studies of their specific areas of concern.

Overall, the 10 essays in the book address many important (and some less important) topics, and raise a range of vital questions, from the tension between national and international law enforcement to how some regimes become reliant on illicit commerce. The authors approach their topics from a range of theoretical perspectives and often drill down deeply into them. While this sometimes means that the individual chapters are very strong, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Intriguing suggestions, such as Friman's assertion that crime is “better understood as an integral part of globalization rather than simply its underside” (p. 1) and that “state and non-state actors have been challenged by and complicit in its expansion” on a global stage (p. 17), partly emerge through the specific case studies, but they are not really explored in the kind of depth and rigor that would have made this book a truly powerful contribution to the literature.

To an extent, this is often the challenge with edited volumes. But beyond that, the answer is also that talking about “global crime” is as meaningful as talking about “global trade”: While there are certainly broad themes, concerns, inhibitors and facilitators, the best chance truly to understand and thus influence it is to address it in more specific terms and consider particular fields of commerce. The fundamental laws of economics, after all, may apply identically to the flows of oil and fine art, but these two businesses also operate under a variety of special and particular conditions. Thus, not only the devil but also the discrimination may be in the details.

To this end, Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a geographer and researcher at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, as well as the leading light of the Geopium.org Website, has contributed a particularly useful exploration of the political economy of the opium industry. After a brief historical introduction to the spread of the opium poppy, from its origins somewhere between the western Mediterranean and Asia Minor to its nineteenth-century criminalization, Chouvy offers a dense but readable account of its rise and rise in the Golden Triangle and Golden Crescent and then the emergence of war-torn Afghanistan as the epicenter of the business. With a mix of both extensive personal experience of the situation on the ground and more than a decade's academic research, he is an effective guide, if also an impassioned and forthright one. When chronicling the militarization of the “war on drugs” and the extent to which, especially in the Cold War, governments were willing to turn a blind eye to narcotics magnates or even ally with them in the name of a higher cause, he does not break much new ground but does provide a clear, strong narrative.

Where Chouvy is at his best is in exploring the efforts to control the production and trafficking of drugs—and, more to the point, the evident failings of past and present policies. Opium bans enacted by local governments can occasionally appear successful. In China, for example, the most successful such ban in history lasted from 1949 to 1960 and largely spared the country drug-related problems until Burmese heroin and amphetamines began sifting across the border in the late 1970s. Likewise, the Taliban was able to implement a relatively successful ban in 2000, ironically broken by the U.S.-led invasion, which toppled the regime the following year. However, such bans are more usually of limited effectiveness. Often, they are unsuccessful, or simply move production to new locations. When Iran tried to introduce a ban in 1955, for example, the growers of Afghanistan and Turkey simply increased production to make up for the aggregate shortfall—and the spike in illegal imports of opiates into Iran, paid for by wholesalers with gold ingots, “severely depleted the Iranian gold reserves” (p. 149) such that the Shah relaxed the ban. Finally, they may simply drive up prices, courtesy of the uncaring laws of supply and demand. In Afghanistan, the success of the 2000 ban made opium all the more valuable as a crop, such that legal alternatives would be cost-ineffective for years to come.

In part, this simply reflects the continued demand for opiates, which ensures a strong transnational market and, thus, prices. Opium production is labor intensive and often risky, rarely being the crop of choice but one of necessity, either because warlords demand it of farmers or simply because it provides cash to buy staple necessities: “Opium production is a consequence of poverty and food insecurity but rarely constitutes a way out of poverty” (p. 141). Simple bans do nothing to address the buoyancy of the export market, and too rarely are combined with meaningful and long-term efforts to create alternative livelihoods for producers. Often this is because production areas are in the hands of nonstate actors rather than the government, such as the United Wa State Army of Myanmar or the warlords of Afghanistan. In such regions, the profits of drug production and trafficking in part also fund insurgency and separatism, whether because the industry is in the hands of the rebels or because it suits the drug magnates to support them in order to maintain a haven for operations. Not surprisingly, the struggle against the narcotics industry and the war against insurgencies soon become intertwined and then dangerously indistinguishable.

Why “dangerously?” As Opium convincingly demonstrates, when counternarcotics and counterinsurgency campaigns intersect, the latter soon reshapes the former, and “measures that are ultimately repressive and destructive continue to be proposed as the only realistic solutions—when exactly the opposite is needed: (re)construction and economic development” (p. 202). If ordinary farmers produce opium—or coca—because they lack security, lack food, and lack viable economic alternatives, then security, food, and economic opportunity is what they need in order to be weaned off this crop, to which they are every bit as addicted in their own way as the ultimate end users. To this end, Chouvy is a strong proponent not so much of alternative development as of durable and viable alternative livelihoods, as advocated in particular by David Mansfield. Providing these may partly require the “kinetic solutions” that are much more tempting for governments and easy to provide, not least in suppressing warlords who demand that farmers continue to grow drugs. However, simply relying on eradication (often by aerial spraying with compounds with potential environmental and public health risks) and suppression, and hoping in this way to undercut insurgents' sources of revenue and thus win the military struggle, hoping then to be able to “win the peace,” appears rarely to work, especially when the amount spent on development is usually only a small fraction of that devoted to warfare. Indeed, if anything, militarized approaches can make drug production more, not less, necessary for the actors in question: “War has turned opium production into a source of funds for military commanders and warlords faced with financial shortages and into a coping mechanism for farmers confronted with a new war-driven market and with war-induced physical and economic disruption” (p. 100).

Chouvy concludes by asserting that “proper sequencing is the key to successful anti-drug policies” because “if forced eradication is undertaken before or during economic development programmes … or if economic development is undertaken before peace-building and state-building are well under way, no decrease in illicit opium production will be possible” (p. 201). This is a view shared by Vanda Felbab-Brown, whose work on the often-malign relationship between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics campaigns led her to challenge the orthodoxy currently being played out in Latin America and Afghanistan, where the one has largely been subsumed within the other.

While Friman is a political economist and Chouvy a geographer, Felbab-Brown is a security studies specialist at the Brookings Institution, whose research has taken her into a variety of badlands and war zones, including Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, and Peru. Her book, Shooting Up, is “concerned primarily with the effect of illicit economies on military conflicts” (p. 10), but it also makes a valuable wider contribution to our understanding of the relationship among states, nonstate actors, and the populations they both seek to woo, suborn, control, and cultivate. While studying how best to combat drug-fueled insurgencies, she also has much to say about the relationship of state and society at times of contested politics.

Central to Felbab-Brown's perspective is the notion of political capital, the perceived legitimacy and popular support of belligerents—state and nonstate actors—and the interaction between their political and military capacities. To her, insurgents' engagement in drug trafficking is not purely a means of raising funds to maintain their coercive strength; it can also allow them to generate political capital, not least by presenting themselves as the defenders of the local growers from government (which would engage in heavy-handed eradication methods without providing adequate alternative opportunities) and also from the more thuggish, capricious, and exploitative traffickers. One of the many virtues of this work is its demonstration that the fashionable notion of a “narco-insurgent nexus” is often nonsense, and that the traffickers and insurgents typically have different identities, aims, and structures. If anything, it is when governments choose to conflate the two that they are driven together, but otherwise the guerrillas often act as a control on the power of paramilitary organized-crime groupings. In other words, insurgents may take on a quasi-state role in regulating the narcotics business and, in the process, create a degree of security for the growers and also raise funds that can not only buy guns and pay gunmen but also allow them to pay for the food they might otherwise simply take, or even provide certain basic social services in their territories. Charles Tilly's explicit parallel between the processes of state making and organized crime certainly looms large over this perspective (although one gripe about the book is the absence of a consolidated bibliography).

In this respect, Felbab-Brown provides a useful correction to Chouvy. The latter all too often falls into the temptation of presenting the growers simply as victims of the trade and the traders. To be sure, it is possible to present them as exploited victims of cynical transnational traffickers, but they may not choose to think of themselves in the same light. Instead, rightly or wrongly, they may consider themselves to be active entrepreneurs willing and able to consider which side in a conflict offers them the most conducive environment for their economic activity. Governments, bound by their laws, international obligations, and a desire to undercut sources of insurgent funding, may seem rather less appealing—especially if, as they so often are, they are corrupt, inefficient, or simply unable to project coercive authority in the growers' immediate location. Felbab-Brown leads off her account, for example, with a sobering tale from southern Afghanistan of villagers turning to the Taliban to protect them from the government's eradication effort, while in Colombia, the FARC guerrilla movement built clinics and presented U.S. counternarcotic plans as imperialist aggression, even putting up billboards reading “Plan Colombia: The gringos supply the weapons, Colombia supplies the dead” (p. 85).

Concluding that “conventional government wisdom has proven to be sadly deficient” (p. 156), Felbab-Brown argues that premature and aggressive counternarcotics campaigns tend not to bankrupt insurgents but, rather, to increase their political capital, regardless of the specific circumstances on the ground. While there are no quick fixes, her insightful and incisive study concludes with a series of policy recommendations geared at strengthening counterinsurgency campaigns by concentrating military efforts on defeating the guerrillas while protecting the population and seeking to disconnect insurgents and criminals. During the military phase of the process, a laissez-faire approach to drugs, perhaps even licensing limited production, avoids needlessly alienating growers, undermines insurgent resources, and largely takes the issue out of play while the government concentrates on “proper” counterinsurgency. The real focus on addressing illicit economies such as narcotics production (and a range of others that fuel insurgency, from logging to blood diamonds) should start after the conflict has ended, as an integral part of peacebuilding, rather than war fighting.

Fighting the good fight against the global narcotics trade in supplier regions is all very well; indeed, it is essential. However, it is hard to believe that the problem can be eliminated in this way. Chouvy demonstrates how often campaigns simply displace production to new locations, and while Felbab-Brown notes how the disintegration of the Cali and Medellin cartels fragmented the Colombian drug industry “and allowed Mexican trafficking organizations to gain dominance of the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere” (p. 76), it is probably more accurate to see a combination of law-enforcement pressure and internal division in Colombia driving the center of gravity of the cocaine industry north, with an impact that the bloody news from Mexico demonstrates every day.

So long as there is a buoyant market for narcotics, there will be those who find ways of satisfying it. In an age of hydroponics, the providers are not even always constrained by climate and ecology, but in any case there always appears scope for new havens in underpoliced or overcorrupt parts of the world. Already there are some signs of opium production moving from Afghanistan into Central Asia, for example. In this context, it is striking how little attention these studies give to the demand side of the business. Chouvy scarcely touches on it, compared with his exhaustive analysis of production, while Felbab-Brown gives it one bullet point on her next-to-last page. To an extent, this is understandable: Both have different concerns, and the whole question of the market for transnationally trafficked drugs, especially prevalent in the richer countries of the West, is a political and practically troublesome one.

It is also an entirely essential issue, however, and one that needs to be addressed at both the national and international levels. Christine Jojarth's ambitious but rather indigestible book considers the factors and processes behind the establishment of four international institutions created to counter the flow of four criminal commodities: drugs (the 1988 United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances), dirty money (the 2003 Financial Action Task Force [FATF] and its Forty Recommendations), blood diamonds (the 2002 Kimberly Process Certification Scheme), and illegal weapons (the 2001 United Nations Program of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons). Whereas the other books tend to be more descriptive, Jojarth sets out a methodologically novel model built around three problem constellation variables drawn from transaction-cost economics theory—asset specificity, behavioral uncertainty, and environmental uncertainty—to demonstrate the underlying hypothesis of Crime, War, and Global Trafficking. It is “that international institutions with high degrees of legalization present the optimal design for dealing with problems characterized by high levels of asset specificity and behavioral uncertainty combined with low levels of environmental uncertainty” (p. 18), while conversely, structures with lower levels of legalization can cope better with problems with little asset specificity and behavioral uncertainty but greater environmental uncertainty.

What does this mean? Essentially, what is described in this debate as “legalization”—not decriminalizing practices but addressing social conflicts through rigid, binding, and transparent legal processes—works best in the context of problems in which the challenge is relatively clear and expensive to address, but which requires the compliance of governments that might otherwise be expected to shirk their responsibilities. Conversely, a less “legal” approach (which in this context does not mean that it is illegal, more that it is a “soft law” approach that is not necessarily binding but flexible, allowing policymakers in effect to adopt, modify, or ignore it as they see fit) works better when the problem is less clear and the solutions are uncertain or unproven, but the countries in question are more reliable partners. She classifies the UN drugs convention as highly “legal,” the FATF and Kimberley Scheme as moderately so, and the UN Small Arms Program as of a low level of “legality,” regarding all but the last as being a good match for the needs of the challenge.

Yet who could argue that, for example, FATF has been able to prevent money laundering? Or that the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances has stopped the steady expansion of this pernicious trade? Once one penetrates the often-opaque prose, Jojarth provides a wealth of detail about how these four international regimes came about and the trade-offs that took place between states, within governments, and between state and nonstate actors from NGOs to trade lobbies in the process. But as an example of the literature of institutional design theory, the book also demonstrates a peculiar disconnect with the real world. Surely the hallmark of an optimal international institution ought to be how effectively it deals with a problem on the ground, rather than how it measures up to a theoretical ideal.

In 2008, the UN General Assembly committed itself to “eliminate or significantly reduce” the overall drug supply and demand by 2019, but even so, its own figures suggest that up to 250 million people globally use illicit narcotic substances at least once. Meanwhile, transnational criminal trades in commodities, from counterfeit DVDs and toxic waste to sex slaves and small arms, bind the world and its inhabitants in networks of complicity, exploitation, opportunity, and power. As Friman rightly says, global crime should not be considered as something apart from globalization, and thus the challenge is likely only to grow. In their own way, all four of these books have something to contribute to an understanding of the nature of this challenge. However, perhaps the most striking common denominator is the sense that there are insights in academe that have yet to be taken seriously by the policy community.

Several such insights are especially evident in these works. The first is that global crime needs to be considered from an economic rather than purely institutional perspective, a recurring theme through both Friman's and Chouvy's books. Individual gangs can be analyzed and combated as such, but so long as there are imbalances of legitimate supply and demand, and of formal laws and customary moral economy, then others will rise in their place. When it comes to such activities as the smuggling of drugs and people, then consumer nations are required to address the demand at home, rather than treat it solely as a supply-side issue. However, criminals are not purely rational actors, and any economic model for their operations must also take into account the ideational factors, the norms and belief systems that support, shape, and sometimes legitimize their actions. Besides, one person's crime is another's opportunity. The criminals may benefit, but so too do other political and economic actors. In volatile economies without effective and reliable legal mechanisms for enforcing contracts and collecting debts, organized crime may provide a valuable alternative, one that actually helps stabilize the environment for entrepreneurs. States may turn to criminals as extralegal assets to buy off powerful interest groups, support “upper-world” economies at home, target dissidents, or carry out espionage abroad. Local populations may profit (or at least believe they do) from the presence of criminals in their midst, spending their ill-gotten gains on local goods or services, offering alternative employment for young men, or simply keeping inefficient, illegitimate, or predatory government agents at bay. In such contexts, law enforcement may seem more like neocolonialism, and efforts to use the “hard power” of coercion prove much less effective than the “soft power” of education, development, and civil society.

Thus, the struggle against international and organized crime is also a microcosm of wider issues of governance in a complex, anarchic, interconnected world. Jojarth, for example, illustrates the difficulties in constructing working international regimes in the absence of global consensus and in the presence of so many cross-cutting sectional interests. Moving from the macro to the micro, Felbab-Brown demonstrates the importance of addressing not just the practical but also the ideational dimension of the problem, disconnecting insurgents from drug lords by attacking both their economic and political resources. Chouvy's work underscores not just the extent to which we need to accept that norms must often be challenged before gangs, but also the dangers of ahistoricity in formulating policy. After all, Friman observes that “policy made without reflection or policy based on reflection that lacks the nuanced understanding of how politics and economics are inextricably linked is a luxury that neither states nor societies can afford” (p. 17). He is right—and in their individual ways, all four books make a contribution by addressing this problematic within modern anticrime policy, and in the process also help illustrate more general limitations of the current instruments of the international order.