In October of 2015, the United States moved to file corruption charges against the former United Nations ambassador for Antigua and Barbuda and five other people for allegedly arranging bribe payments so that a UN facility would be built in China. The fact that U.S. authorities pursued charges for international political corruption comes as little surprise to most observers, but as Anja P. Jakobi reminds us in Common Goods and Evils, this would not have been the case 30 years ago when political corruption was simply viewed as the cost of doing international business. In fact, businesses used to be able to write foreign bribes off for tax purposes. Yet even as the international response to crime has become more coordinated, there has been a sharp spike in sensationalist publications, scholarly and nonscholarly alike, focusing on the unprecedented rise of global crime. From counterfeiting to drug trafficking to human smuggling, crime is up. Or so the story goes (even if the rise in crime is simply commensurate with the rise in international trade).
Jakobi’s work serves as an antidote to these accounts by focusing on the equally increasing international response to crime. The author adopts a world society theory approach and a focus on rationalization to explore and explain the spread of global crime governance over the longue durée (but especially since the end of the Cold War). In the process, she applies her theoretical framework to a series of case studies—money laundering, anticorruption norms, and human trafficking—to explain the variations in the adoption of crime governance regimes. Finally, she introduces the concept of institutional entrepreneurs to world society theory in order to transform it from a theory that has been good at describing and explaining policy outcomes to one that can now also explain change and variance.
Early explanations of global crime governance, including the responses to the international slave trade, so-called white slavery (i.e., trafficking for prostitution), and alcohol consumption, focused on the rise of nongovernmental organizations and “moral entrepreneurs” and their ability, in rare cases, to change the discourse around a particular subject such that, over time, a wide range of governments adopted similar rules and responses (i.e., see Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in Internationalization, 2008). These explanations have also explored the ways in which, after 9/11, the United States has used its power and leverage to force other countries to adopt similar policing protocols and practices.
Jakobi builds on this work by correctly noting that since the end of the Cold War, moral entrepreneurs have played a less important role in the expansion of global crime governance. But if moral entrepreneurs are playing less of a role, then how do we explain, outside of pure coercion on the part of the United States, the rise and increasingly coordinated implementation of global crime governance? Her answer is that global crime governance is most successful when it is not based on “prescriptive policies and moral convictions” but, rather, when it is based on technical means–ends bureaucratic applications that can be widely applied (p. 55). To test her hypothesis, she does the three case studies mentioned earlier—money laundering, anticorruption norms, and human trafficking—each of which, not surprisingly, has a different outcome.
In the case of money laundering, the United States wanted to internationalize national laws that were highly rationalized and provided a simple set of rules to follow and enforce. The United States used the Group of Seven (G-7) to establish a global standard aimed at coercing smaller countries into adopting its standards. At the beginning, the G-7 had to rely on a “naming and shaming” approach, but over time they achieved almost total acceptance, or at least application, as the number of true supporters may actually be much smaller than the number who are abiding by the rules.
Global anticorruption norms are more fragmented than anti–money laundering because anticorruption is both rationalizing and prescriptive. Not surprisingly, the United States has been the moral entrepreneur here as well. The United States passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in 1977 after Watergate, but it was not until 1997 that it convinced the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to adopt its position. Since then, the implementation of anticorruption conventions has spread to the Organization of American States, the World Bank, the Council of Europe, and finally, the United Nations, where the UN Convention against Corruption in 2000 has established a single international protocol on corruption, a protocol that has not been successfully implemented across the globe.
Human trafficking is more prescriptive and, given the complexity of the views of competing actors, less open to technical rationalizing solutions than either money laundering or anticorruption. Although the UN did adopt a protocol in 2000 (that went into effect in 2003), there is no effective enforcement structure. This is because the United States is a weak institutional entrepreneur vis-à-vis this issue since it differs with most other nations on its interpretation of the causes of and solutions to human trafficking. In short, the United States views human trafficking as a moral issue, while many others view it through the lens of human rights.
As Jakobi’s three case studies attest, she is on to something here. Her conception of institutional entrepreneurs provides scholars with another tool for understanding the rise of global crime governance. In addition, her focus on rationalization helps to explain just how global an international response is likely to be. Where there are technocratic fixes to specific sets/types of international crimes, institutional entrepreneurs are able, over time, to implement effective international protocols, even when some nation-states disagree. The more prescriptive a particular issue is, the more patchwork an attempted technical solution will be.
Yet I wonder if the expansion of global crime governance would quickly unravel should the United States fall from its position as global hegemon. Back in 1999, Mark Peceny’s Democracy at the Point of Bayonets found that the United States tended to promote democracy (through liberalizing institutions and elections) in the countries that it invaded when the world was multipolar or unipolar, but during the Cold War when the world was bipolar, security interests tended to trump democracy promotion. Likewise, as Jakobi notes, the promotion of global crime governance has really taken off since the end of the Cold War (and often at the insistence of the United States). This has especially been the case since 9/11. Would the reemergence of a bipolar or multipolar world undo much of the most recent global crime governance work? I do not know, but it bears consideration.
Furthermore, and this is not a complaint about her work, the possibility that she is right about the rationalization of global crime governance is very concerning. As Tony Payan colleagues argue in A War That Can’t Be Won: Binational Perspectives on the War on Drugs, 2013, it is the denizens of the U.S.-Mexico border who pay the highest price for the national and international responses to the unending appetite of the United States for mind-altering drugs, yet the very people who are most impacted have little input into the policies that are implemented. Likewise, the policymaking process for global crime governance is hardly democratic and seldom takes into account the voices of those most effected. As Jakobi notes in her treatment of human trafficking, the U.S. stance on the issue has actually served to reinforce the systemic inequalities that make human trafficking more likely.
