The Globalization of Deviance and Crime

Dear Colleagues,

The watchword of the twenty-first century is globalization. The social and political levels on which most of us operate day to day are intuitively obvious and easily grasped—the local, the regional, the national. Even the international level, which pictures events happening in two countries in different parts of the world can be grasped by most people. However, understanding the global level entails conceiving of phenomena from multiple points of view. The global level entails a worldwide network of relationships binding people in a diversity of nations into an interactive structure.

With the growth of international travel and commerce, interchanges have grown exponentially between origin societies and host societies. These networks, which have existed for millennia, have created a world that is interconnected into a global network. The terminology of David Held, the British political scientist, around the world has become more extensive, more intensive, more rapid, and more impactful. The expansion of economies on a worldwide scale, however, has also opened the floodgates to the globalization of crime and deviance. In modernization, there is globalization; in globalization, there is crime on a global scale. The explosion of capitalism worldwide has generated an avalanche of opportunities for new types of criminal activities that are dependent on crossing borders, on making agreements with crime partners in different nations—and, with these illicit arrangements to engage in criminal enterprises in a multiplicity of societies working in tandem comes a surveillance and law enforcement response which is also global. New routes are mapped out and forged; illicit enterprises adapt to new law enforcement methods; and there is a dynamic, a synergy between crime and law enforcement.

As underground or illicit economies grow, so do surveillance and enforcement techniques. New ways of bringing illicit goods and services to multiple locales are devised. Contacts are developed and activated. Arrests bring new recruits into illicit enterprises. Today, arms trafficking is a $60 billion a year industry. Widespread access to and personal use of the Internet did not begin until the 1990s, but cybercrime now generates revenues of hundreds of billions of dollars. Illegal enterprises have smuggled humans across borders for as long as national borders have existed, but the enterprise is vaster and more profitable at any time in human history. In the 1950s, the scale of drug smuggling and the number of countries involved were minuscule compared with today’s operations; the UN estimates that drug smuggling worldwide generates one percent of the entire world economy. Along with scale comes the complexity of trade routes developed to elude law enforcement. Moreover, political instability breeds opportunities for the globalization of crime.

Prof. Dr. Erich Goode
Guest Editor

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