ABSTRACT
Within the context of the ‘war on drugs’ launched by the United States in the 1970s, what was referred to as ‘international crime’ or ‘cross-border crime’ mainly encompassed drug trafficking and the proceeds of such crime: money laundering.1 At the beginning of the 1990s, however, political discourses on international crime began to gradually change and the shift away from the ‘war on drugs’ to the fight against TOC as a whole began to occur (Woodiwiss 2003a: 25-6; Mitsilegas 2003a: 76-7; Sheptycki 2003: 129-30). The 1994 UN Naples Conference certainly marked a key moment in the process of internationalizing the challenge posed by TOC because for the first time at global level it formalized the perception of what TOC was by offering a common working definition. ‘Transnational organized crime’ was thus defined as comprising: the organization of groups for criminal purposes; the presence of hierarchical or personal links that allow certain individuals to direct the group; the laundering of illicit proceeds; the potential to expand into new activities and beyond national borders; cooperation with other organized transnational groups (Sheptycki 2003: 123-4). This endorsement at international level of TOC has raised challenging questions and debates. Among them, the question of the social construction of TOC remains at the core of most critical analysis devoted to this issue. Numerous scholars have, for instance, convincingly challenged the very nature of the concept of organized crime, underlying its historical origins and developments at the political level (Woodiwiss 2003a, 2005; Sheptycki 2003; Mitsilegas 2003a), or questioning the characteristics associated with it, such as the degree of organization (Reuter 1983; van Duyne 1996b; Fijnaut, et al. 1998; Beare and Naylor 1999), or the supposed monolithic and monopolistic aspects of it (den Boer 1997; Desroches 2003). In addition, explanations have been developed in order to give an account of the shifts in political discourses and the arising of an international mobilization against the rather vague concept of ‘TOC’. Some scholars, for instance, have insisted on the latent failure of the ‘war on drugs’ launched by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in order to explain the broadening of the US agenda among international arenas in the field of criminal justice (Nadelmann 1993). The alleged existence of a ‘new threat’, TOC, which had been present in
US political discourses since the early 1990s, thus led to the broadening of the concept of organized crime to encompass a whole set of transnational criminal practices, thereby making it possible to ‘excuse’ the failure of national and international anti-drugs efforts at the same time as justifying their expansion to other areas (Woodiwiss 2003b: 25-8). Studies also turn to the prevailing context at the end of the 1980s in which the security assumptions of the Cold War era were being called into question in order to explain the success of the international mobilization against TOC (Anderson, et al. 1995; Bigo 1995; Edwards and Gill 2003). All these well-informed approaches have in common to challenge the image of TOC as a homogeneous threat, as most of the political and practitioners’ discourses at the international level suggest.
