ABSTRACT
Dates provide an alluring framework for historical and political analysis; for example, we routinely compare the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as though the numbers 1800 and 1900 can actually do any more for explanation than provide convenient bookends. So, here, it is tempting to identify the decade 1991-2001 as, in international political terms, the decade of transnational organised crime. Even more precisely, the bookends might be formed, at one end, by the failure of the conservative coup in Russia in August 1991 or the decision of several republics to form the Commonwealth of Independent States in December and, more clearly at the other, September 11, 2001, when hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
