426 CHAPTER ElEvEn ■ TransnaTional issues
transnational crime
Over the last two de cades, transnational crime has emerged alongside global health
as a major issue of international relations, leading Moisés Naím to posit, “Global crim-
inal activities are transforming the international system, upending the rules, creating
new players, and reconfiguring power in international politics and economics.”^17 As
the frequency, intensity, and likelihood of interstate war declines, we can begin to focus
on other per sis tent issues. And the capacity of transnational criminal organ izations
(TCOs) to cause harm to people (and, by extension, states) has increased over time in
proportion to the continual drop in the costs of communication between places. In
2015, the data analy sis firm Havocscope identified the economic value per year of the
top 50 categories of or ga nized crime worldwide.^18 The numbers are staggering: the top
six categories alone— counterfeit drugs ($200 billion), prostitution ($186 billion), coun-
terfeit electronics ($169 billion), marijuana ($141.8 billion), illegal gambling ($140
billion), and cocaine ($85 billion)— total nearly a trillion U.S. dollars. Beyond the exam-
ples of human and sex trafficking discussed in Chapter 10, two additional examples of
transnational crime are narcotrafficking and cyber crime.
narcotrafficking
Trafficking in illegal drugs—in par tic u lar highly addictive narcotics—is one form of
transnational crime that garnered international attention following the end of the Cold
Wa r. Narcotrafficking— the transportation of large quantities of narcotics such as her-
oin or cocaine across state borders— has always been a prob lem. By the early 1970s, it
had become severe enough in the United States that President Richard Nixon declared
a “war on drugs,” reasoning that lives lost to drug abuse were akin to casualties of war.
In NATO countries alone, over 10,000 people die annually from heroin overdoses.^19
The other advantage of declaring a war on drugs was that “war” implies a shared under-
taking that mobilizes all sectors of society to victory in a just cause. It also implied
that the best way to address the prob lem was to cut off the supply of drugs to potential
customers. But the prob lem is that such a “war” can never be won. Even if the
destruction of major tracts of land where opium poppies or coca plants are grown can
temporarily reduce the supply, the costs of shipping large quantities of product long
distances are so low that new areas of cultivation can quickly be found to replace the
lost supply.
Another challenge in preventing narcotrafficking is that the production, refinement,
and shipment of narcotics contributes substantially to gross national product in many
countries, including those that supply the raw materials for illegal narcotics, like Colombia
and Af ghan i stan, and countries that are transit routes for narcotics, like Tajikistan. Thus,