ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the intersections of a variety of smugglings flows. Across the world, trafficking routes are used for a number of different types of goods, and in various directions. In Libya, for example, people, arms, drugs, and contraband are smuggled on the same routes, in Myanmar, both human trafficking and drug trafficking take place across the border to Thailand and China, and in Colombia, cocaine is shipped abroad via Venezuela and on that same route gasoline is smuggled from Venezuela into Colombia. In order to account for this interconnectedness, this chapter conceptualizes illicit flows as illicit supply chain networks rather than as individual linear chains. These networks include strategic trafficking nodes, that is, illicit business hubs and starting points of international trafficking routes where various illicit flows converge. These are the places where violent entrepreneurs meet to strike business deals, and where rivalry over economic profit turns into selective violence. The chapter thus calls for moving beyond the study of individual flows in isolation. We must focus instead both scholarly and policy attention on the interconnectedness of legally and illegally used routes in order to grasp the social, economic, and political repercussions on the contexts in which the flows are embedded.
