1

Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna

SCUOLA di SCIENZE POLITICHE Sede di Forlì

Corso di Laurea in

Scienze Internazionali e Diplomatiche (Classe LM-52)

TESI DI LAUREA

in Relazioni Internazionali

Critical Security Perspectives on Transnational Organized Crime: The Case of the European Union

CANDIDATO RELATORE Claudia Marà Sonia Lucarelli

Anno Accademico 2012/2013

Sessione III

2

3

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 5

Chapter 1. Critical Studies on Security ..................................................................................... 8

Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 8

What’s in a Name? ................................................................................................................. 9

The Copenhagen School ....................................................................................................... 16

Post-structuralism and the Paris School ............................................................................... 20

Post-structuralist Approaches ........................................................................................... 20

The Paris School ............................................................................................................... 23

The Welsh School ................................................................................................................ 26

Post-colonialist Perspectives ................................................................................................ 30

Feminist and Gender Outlooks on Security ......................................................................... 33

Fields of Application of the Critical Studies on Security ..................................................... 36

Migrations and Border Control ........................................................................................ 36

Terrorism .......................................................................................................................... 37

Exploring a Critical Understanding of Transnational Organized Crime.......................... 38

Chapter 2. Critical Perspectives on Transnational Organized Crime ....................................... 39

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 39

A Critical History of the Concept of Organized Crime ....................................................... 41

The Kefauver Commission and the “Alien Conspiracy Theory” ..................................... 42

Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover and the Securitization of Organized Crime ............... 43

Organized Crime and Popular Culture ............................................................................. 44

Organized Crime under the Reagan Presidency: Going Global ....................................... 45

Organized Crime as the “External Threat” ...................................................................... 47

The Transnationalization of Organized Crime ..................................................................... 49

The Post-Cold War and the Official Discourse on TOC .................................................. 49

The Birth of a New Threat ............................................................................................... 51

Is TOC really a New Threat? ........................................................................................... 55

TOC after September 11 and the Paris School ................................................................. 57

New Perspectives on Transnational Organized Crime ......................................................... 63

4

Chapter 3. Transnational Organized Crime in the European Union: a Case Study ................. 68

Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 68

Organized Crime in the Framework of the Area of Justice and Home Affairs .................... 70

The Pre-Schengen Era ...................................................................................................... 70

The Schengen Agreement and the Maastricht Treaty ...................................................... 72

The Amsterdam Treaty and the Action Plan on the Combat against Organized Crime .. 76

Towards the Implementation of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: the Tampere Program ............................................................................................................................ 80

The post- 9/11 Evolution of the EU Fight against TOC .................................................. 84

The fight against TOC in the EU after the Lisbon Treaty ................................................ 86

The Threat of TOC in the European Security Discourse ..................................................... 88

Tackling the Explanatory Questions ................................................................................ 89

Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 98

Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 101

5

Introduction

And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Cavafy C.P. 1904

Every historical era and society has its barbarians, its enemies. Today, politicians depict

transnational organized crime (TOC) as one of the fiercest enemies of democratic societies.

Mafia-like syndicates from all over the world are portrayed as wide, powerful and ruthless

criminal groups able to cross national boundaries to pursue their criminal activities and decay

the modern well-functioning political communities. In the last decades, the tones of the

political discourse on the subject have sharpened until transnational organized crime has been

granted the full title of security threat. Since TOC has entered the realm of security, a great

deal of attention has been paid by states’ and international institutions to the possible ways of

combating the phenomenon. However, victory against such late- modern barbarians appears

less and less likely.

In the academic domain, most contributions have mirrored the understanding of transnational

organized crime as a threat to security, in line with the mainstream official discourse on the

topic; this position has focused its attention on researching the most effective law

enforcement measures to tackle the phenomenon. The “law enforcement approach” has been

further enhanced by the abundant documentation provided by the many security agencies that

stand in the first line in the international fight against TOC.

Yet, during the last fifteen years, the subject has drawn the attention of several scholars

belonging to the field of the Critical Studies on Security (CSS). In particular, the Copenhagen

School and the Paris School have analyzed the phenomenon of transnational organized crime

through the post-structuralist lenses of deconstruction, offering an understanding of the

security threat posed by TOC quite unrelated to the mainstream narratives on security.

Researchers such as Didier Bigo, Thierry Balzacq and Jef Huysmans have read the increasing

concern of the political class for transnational organized crime as a major example of the

ongoing reconceptualization of the field of security. Indeed, despite the growing interest

demonstrated by the critical scholars for the topic of TOC, the issue is usually dealt with as

6

being just one of the various prototypes of new threats. Hence, there remains an analytical gap

of the specific phenomenon by itself.

This dissertation represents an attempt to remedy the absence of such examination in the

framework of the Critical Studies on Security. By shifting the main focus from the general

field of security towards the more explicit topic of transnational organized crime, it will be

possible to engage in the critical analysis of the political narrative constructed around TOC

and leading to the institutionalization of the matter as a major security threat. In this effort, the

voices of the CSS will be complemented with the rich and diverse contributions provided by

the researchers from the domain of Critical Criminology. Thanks to the outstanding works of

scholars such as Adam Edwards, Letizia Paoli and J. Shepticky, the field of Critical

Criminology offers a large and innovative body of work on TOC, which will prove to be

helpful in the deconstruction of the securitarian discourse on TOC.

The dissertation will be, therefore, divided in three chapters. The first chapter will introduce

the reader to the broad and extremely diverse field of the Critical Studies on Security. Since

the end of the 1980s, the many voices of the CSS have offered an innovative approach in the

domain of International Relations, challenging the hegemony of realism and idealism and

widely contributing to rethink the concept of security in the aftermath of the Soviet demise. In

fact, the CSS could be imagined as a network where different schools of thought and

theoretical branches collaborate, argue and exchange ideas, with the result of shaping a

stimulating and multifaceted philosophical environment. To make sense of the heterogeneous

world of the CSS, the first section will review the many contributions clustered in diverse

categories; namely: the Copenhagen School, Post-structuralism and the Paris School, the

Welsh School, the Post-colonialists and the Feminist and Gender theorists.

Within the second chapter, the thesis’s main points on transnational organized crime will be

introduced. The theoretical methodologies described in the first chapter will become the very

instrument for the deconstruction of the narrative of TOC as officially created in the

international environment. The concept(s) of (in)securitization coined by the scholars of the

Copenhagen School and complemented by the further speculation of the Paris School will be

utilized to understand the trajectory of the thematization of organized crime in the Western

world. Setting the analysis on the temporal scale, the chapter will emphasize the political and

cultural construction of the discourse on TOC, started in the United States during the 1930s

and internationalized in most recent times. Importantly, the Critical Studies on Security will

not be let alone in shaping this genealogy of the narration of TOC as a security threat. Indeed,

7

they will be compounded with the brilliant contributions on the topic coming from the field of

Critical Criminology. The combination of the critical voices from both the criminological and

the security fields represents one of the main innovations brought by this piece of research.

By drawing on the prolific criminological literature that deals with TOC, the security analysis

of the topic could be enriched with new and alternative insights from a different discipline.

Finally, the third chapter will suggest an examination of the discourse on the phenomenon of

transnational organized crime as enacted within the European Union’s institutions. The choice

of the EU as a case study originates from the evidence that TOC embodies one of the key

points of the security narrative built in the European Union after the important changes started

with the Schengen Agreement. The abolition of the internal borders and the consequential

formation of an internal field of security have enabled the construction of a security narration

based on the alleged transnationality of new threats. Through the analysis of the official

documents and reports issued by the EU on the topic of internal security, it will be possible to

recognize the increasing scope and importance granted to TOC as a major, dangerous threat.

Once again, the contributions of the Paris School researchers will prove to be paramount to

understand the narrativization of transnational organized crime in the framework of the more

general restructuring of the field and practices of internal security in Europe.

The concepts and the achievements presented in the following pages might contribute to spur

further research on the critical rethinking of organized crime, possibly towards a positive

reconceptualization of the very instruments used in the fight against TOC.

8

Chapter 1. Critical Studies on Security

Introduction

It would not be correct nor satisfactory for the purpose of this dissertation to begin a

discussion about the Critical Studies on Security with a periodization that would assume an

approximate date of birth for this approach. Some might highlight the end of the Cold War as

a major cleavage from which the studies on security in International Relations took a critical

turn, departing from the mainstream “traditional” approaches. But in fact such clear-cut

periodization would leave out of our analysis major works that have been forerunners for the

development of the reconceptualization of security on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The highly diverse nature of the many contributions to the field of critical studies in

International Relations provides the researchers that attempt to define and categorize this

subfield with a tough task. Several endeavors by well-known scholars have resulted in

incomplete overviews of a naturally chaotic branch of research. If the domain of the Critical

Studies on Security is inherently reticent to any reduction to categories and conceptual boxes,

it would be then recommendable to follow Cambell’s and George’s advice to shift the angle of

analysis towards an understanding of the Critical Studies as an open “thinking space”

(Cambell and George 1990, 270).

Nevertheless, it will be paramount to look into the concepts that constitute the label itself that

this new field of research has been granted. The unpacking and the contextualization of the

meaning of the words “Critical” and “Security” will provide a broader understanding of the

theoretical framework that this chapter will deal with. Despite the difficulty of systematizing

the many diverse contributions to the field as mentioned above, the analysis will continue

with a sketch of the main theoretical affiliations that can be gathered under the umbrella of the

Critical Studies on Security.

1The main reference here is to Berry Buzan’s work “People, States and Fear” first edited in 1983, Ken Booth’s “Strategy and Ethnocentrism” published in 1979 and Richard K. Ashley’s “The Poverty of Neorealism” from 1984.

9

The critical approach to security discussed in the next pages will prove fundamental to

provide a new framework for the analysis of Transnational Organized Crime in the following

chapters.

What’s in a Name?

Critical

The choice of words adopted to signify a particular concept is an important and often

underestimated move. Therefore, an initial explanatory note deserves our attention. I use the

wordings “Critical Studies on Security” following the editors of the newly born homonymous

academic journal to label the sum of the many critical approaches to security in International

Relations. The other option would have been to utilize “Critical Security Studies”. However,

doing so would leave room for ambiguity, since one of the central schools of thought within

the field, namely the Welsh School, suggests a direct application of the philosophical concepts

of the Critical Theory, as defined by the Frankfurt School, to security.

Therefore, the term “critical” cannot be reduced to one specific philosophical school

rather signifies a whole genus of thought. The label was adopted for the first time during the

1993 conference “Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies” that took

place at the York University and from which the first volume compounding different critical

perspectives on security was later edited by the scholars Michael Williams and Keith Krause

(Mutimer et al. 2013, 2). Not to put the yoke to any possible further development, the authors

of the book “sought” not “to define a precise meaning of the term critical in either a

methodological or political sense” (emphasis in the original) (Krause and Williams 1997, 9).

It rather came to identify more an “orientation towards the discipline than a precise theoretical

label”, an orientation shared by the many “perspectives that have been considered outside of

the mainstream” of the field (Krause and Williams1997, 9). The ground where all critical

views on security meet is the univocal claim for “dissent” (Campbell and George 1990), the

resistance to long-established powers and modes of understanding reality and security. 2An account of the Aberystwyth School and its relations to the Frankfurt Critical Theory will be provided later in this chapter.

10

Despite (or by virtue of) the Marxist derivation of many of such views, the rebellion set by the

critical scholars does not promote a fight against a “false representation of reality (the

ideology)” but it rather attempts to reveal that “the real is no longer real” (Baudrillard 1983,

quoted in Dillon and Campbell 1993, 102). The game is therefore played on both the grounds

of ontology and epistemology. Challenging the positivist tenet that social reality is a uniform

external resource that can be studied with the tools borrowed from the natural sciences, the

critical theorists promote a reflexive approach that locates the individual within the reality

itself and not outside of it. With the adoption of an insight from the inside, the researcher is

allowed to see things from a different perspective, he is urged to problematize what before

was taken for granted and perceived as normal. To say it with Foucault, “criticism is a matter

of making facile gestures difficult” (Foucault 1988, quoted in Mutimer et al. 2013, 4).

Once the uniformity of actuality is demolished, this comes to be replaced by a multitude of

dissimilar narrations of it, constituting therefore the new ontological framework. Not all

narratives however have the same strength: just few of them can break through and become

y become meta-narratives. Some narratives

win then, some others do not. It is in the thrust to disclose these dynamics of victory and

domination of one discourse over another that all the voices of dissent gather to speak up their

critique: the belief that the knowledge-power relation determines who dominates and who is

dominated represents the fil rouge that connects the post-structuralists with the gender studies

scholars, the post-colonialists with the Copenhagen and Welsh Schools’ associates. To quote a

powerful passage by Walter Benjamin that clarifies the impact of this ontological structure on

actuality, “the history that showed things as they really were was the strongest narcotic of the

century” (Benjamin 1999, quoted in Der Derian 2009, 3).

The pars destruens of this critical approach bespeaks a further endeavor to create a more just

alternative, as Mutimer puts it:

The recognition that social structures are oppressive, and generally not seen as such,

leads to a political commitment to the transformation of the social structures under

critique. In the other notable expression of social critique, Marx argued that “The

it (Marx 1888)” (Mutimer et al. 2013, 4).

The field of security

In 1991 Stephen M. Walt warned the academic community in a remarkable article appeared

on the International Studies Quarterly to “remain wary of counterproductive tangents that

11

have seduced other areas of international studies, most notably the “post-modern” approach to

international affairs” (Walt 1991, 223). Just one utterance to sentence to death the non-

mainstream evolutions of the studies on security that the domain had started to witness since

the early 1980s. Indeed Walt was trying to shed new light on a field of research that after its

“golden age”, located between 1950 and 1965, had lost power among the other topics of the

international studies scholarships. Not accidentally the title of the article was “The

Renaissance of Security Studies”, a rebirth however that did not leave any chance to

theoretically different approaches to break into the state-centric, military understanding of

security. When challenged with the need to define the concept of security, Walt reiterates a

cozy description of the notion that we could categorize as “orthodox”:

The main focus of security studies is easy to identify: it is the phenomenon of war.

Security studies assume that conflict between states is always a possibility and that

the use of military force has far-reaching effects on states and societies. Accordingly,

security studies may be defined as the study of the threat, use and control of the

military force (emphasis added) (Walt 1991, 212).

He placed himself in academic continuity with the tradition of the studies of national security,

which recognizes in Thomas Schelling and Arnold Wolfers his founding fathers and in the

RAND Corporation the main promoter institution. Concentrating on works “that meet the

standard of logic and evidence in the social sciences” (1991, 213), Walt discards the attempts

to include non-military issues, such as poverty, environmental hazards, social uneasiness,

within the field of security studies. In his words, such a move would run “the risk of

expanding security studies excessively” (1991, 213). By doing so, Walt delineates “an explicit

epistemic hierarchy”, where the neo-realist overview of security is placed at the apogee of a

purported linear knowledge itinerary and is therefore entitled to a “claim of authority” in the

field (Krause and Williams 1997). In other words, Walt adds strength to the specific

reproduction of knowledge that since the birth of the discipline of International Relations

hegemonizes the field, promoting a state-centric, positivist and military idea of security.

But whatever the hasty and slightly disdainful rejection of the new views on security, Walt

identifies the focal point of distance between his vision of security studies and the brand new

research that some years from then will start to be labeled as “critical”. While his concept of

security was confined to the preservation and protection of the nation state (and therefore

refers primarily to the military apparatus), the discordant rising voices proposed to broaden

and deepen the idea of security. The new research agenda has not only tried to stretch the

meaning of security in International Relations through the expansion to fields that go beyond

12

cal

theorists have also (however often implicitly) worked on ways to rethink the philosophical

meaning of security in a post-positivist fashion.

In a paper entirely dedicated to the reconceptualization of security within the critical field of

research, Jef Huysmans challenges the logic existence as “concept” and “definition”. The

quest for a neat and coherent meaning of security represents a “search for unity” that would

narrow down any attempt to liberate such noun from the restricted content that it was granted

by the traditionalist approaches (Huysmans 1998, 230). Huysmans rather suggests

understanding security as a broader logic category, as a “thick signifier”. Borrowed by

Ferdinand de Saussure’s contribution to the field of linguistics, making security a thick

signifier implies:

A particular formulation of question, a particular arrangement of material. In a thick

signifier analysis, one tries to understand how security language implies a specific

metaphysics of life. In other words, interpreting security as a thick signifier brings us to

an understanding of how the category security articulates a particular way of organizing

forms of life (Huysmans 1998, 231).

It is therefore not only the content of the noun “security” that ends being scrutinized by the

post-positivist speculation, but also the overall linguistic and logic apparatus carried by this

term.

The deconstruction that the security concept undergoes follows for many features the

genealogical pattern: some critical scholars have engaged with this analysis to trace back the

path that has shaped the generally accepted idea of security within modernity (Der Derian

revealing the original core foundations on which the whole category is built, those elements

that contributed to create “a particular way of organizing forms of life” (Huysmans 1998,

231). Reading security as a historically-based concept allows for a reconsideration of it in

relativistic terms: in other words, what had hermeneutic power during the last three-hundred

years might not be consistent with the current world affairs anymore. It will then be likely to

produce “new possibilities and intelligibilities for security” (Der Derian 1993b, 85).

3“Genealogy is a hermeneutical form of analysis and critique sprung from the mind of the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. [..] Genealogy looks at things through a historical lens and problematizes all that stands as an issue to one as well as to the development of humanity. Genealogy is a historical hermeneutical analysis and critique which is fundamentally anti-realist, anti-dialectical and against the ascetic ideal to thus test the theoretical and practical credibility of ideas and practices, end them through transformation and show new pathways towards the affirmation of life” (Molina 2010, 12)

13

Commonly all authors agree on identifying Thomas Hobbes as the greatest contributor to the

shaping of the modern concept of security. The state of nature depicted in the Leviathan

corresponds to the best -but nonetheless fictitious- representation of insecurity. Hobbes’ dark

anthropology outlines an endless, disruptive fight of every man against every man within an

environment that would be wrong to name “society”: the companionship that such word

implies is emphatically excluded in the homo homini lupus relations. This ground set, the only

possible foreseeable action to secure the life of the individual, which is otherwise bound to be

constantly at risk of death, is to deprive all men of their power to govern themselves and to

resort to violence. In exchange for a safe and brighter life, the human beings will be inclined

to give up their own freedom to an impartial Leviathan who will rule the state with the

supreme task of guaranteeing the stability, peace and security among its citizens.

However, despite the internal pacification, a further threat is continually menacing the life of

the state’s population: the existence of other states outside the national borders, which, as on a

large scale reproduction of the human state of nature, are involved in a constant battle against

each other. If we were now to follow the logic that Hobbes engaged in to solve the distress

suffered by the individuals in the state of nature, we should seek to replace the international

anarchy with a global government upon which every state could rely for their security. In fact

Hobbes disregards the need to create an international Leviathan simply because he does not

consider it as absolutely necessary. It is much more risky to live without a Leviathan at the

state level than at the international level.

The Leviathan then has the double mission of administering and maintaining stability inside

the state’s borders and to protect the state itself by aliens’ attempts to trespass his territory and

damage his society. Thanks to the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” (Weber

2004, 23) through the use of the state’s military apparatus, the Leviathan or whoever more

realistically embodies his position can defend the state, its population and its core values from

any outside threat. The Leviathan can, in other words, ensure the state’s security.

Discussing the value of security, James Der Derian defines Hobbes’ passages about the

international sphere as “the ontotheological foundations of an epistemic realism, in the sense

of an ethico-political imperative embedded in the nature of things” (emphasis added) (Der

Derian 1993a, 94). The American scholar indulges in the adoption of such complex

terminology to signify the widespread belief that only one form of security is possible because

it is based on an a priori ontological necessity, the defense of sovereignty. Hobbes’ words

carve in stone the foundations of the condition of modernity: the sovereign state and

14

territoriality “become the necessary effect of anarchy, contingency, disorder” that comes into

existence through a new man-made order that removes the “natural and evil chaos”(emphasis

added) (1993a, 151). What at the beginning was just a belief undergoes a process of

essentialization and becomes the only hermeneutical category to understand reality: Hobbes

can be then considered the founding father of an epistemic realism that shapes all

understanding of world politics as a perennial battleground where the only security

conceivable is the one that protects the state’s borders and values.

The genealogical deconstruction of the traditional concept of security as embedded in the

culture of modernity opens the field to academic attempts to rethink security in different

fashions. Many critical scholars have been invested for such purpose since the 1980s and

nonetheless the academia involved have not been able to produce a unified new concept to

replace the old one. In a way, we could find in the nature itself of the critical studies the

rejection of a cohesive and definitive idea of security: as mentioned above, Huysmans’

category of “thick signifier” fits more coherently the purposes of the critical studies on

security. Therefore, as Huysmans put it, “rather than being a tool of clarification serving an

agenda, the exploration of the meaning of security is the critical security studies agenda itself”

(emphasis in the original) (Huysmans 1998, 228).

The following sections of this chapter will consider the diverse voices that have contributed to

shape the critical discourse on security, providing an overview of the main approaches and

contributions that have populated the rich world of the Critical Studies on Security. It will be

essential for the sake of clarity of the review to cluster the thinkers and their academic

production according to some discriminatory principle. In their endeavor to map the field of

the critical studies on security, Peoples and Vaughan-Williams consider three different ways to

deal with the potential groupings within the domain: first, an intellectual narrative that is

based on a negative definition of the Critical Studies in relation to their distance from the

“traditional” approaches to security (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 3). A second

narration that emphasizes the temporal variable and constructs the evolution of the critical

thinking on security as heavily influenced by the end of the Cold War and the events of

September 2001. The last modality is a geographical one: the distinction of “schools of

thought” based in different (mostly European) cities, where each of them refers to a specific

approach developed by the academics of one or more research institutes. The three schools

that are generally accepted as leaders in the research of critical studies on security are the

Copenhagen School, the Paris School and the Welsh School.

15

However, as Peoples and Vaughan-Williams recognize in the introduction to their book, it

would be recommendable to “travel without maps” in the field of the Critical Studies on

Security. Indeed, limiting the review just to the contributions that fit one or another narrative

would provide the reader with a very narrow and fairly incomplete account of the domain.

Therefore, a thorough examination of the Critical Studies on Security necessitates the

combination of approaches that come both from specific research institutes, the so-called

“schools of thought”, and broader ones that are not pegged to any university but that rather

refer to a precise set of principles and assumptions. Of this second category, the post-colonial

studies on security and all the feminist and gender-related contributions to the security field

represent probably the most prosperous and systematized thoughts.

The next pages will then engage in a variable-geometry review accounting for the following

considerations on security: the Copenhagen School, Post-structuralism and the Paris School,

the Welsh School, Post-colonialist and Feminist contributions.

As the C.A.S.E Collective has claimed in a manifesto appeared on Security Dialogue in 2006,

it is always important to keep in mind that the organization of the critical thinking on security

is more one of a network where a “sustained cross-fertilization among critical approaches”

generates a continuous and constructive dialogue, than a fixed set of sealed packages filled

each with a precise content (C.A.S.E Collective 2006, 2). Therefore, the artificial categories

employed in the following sections are only meant to supply the examination with a necessary

research but rather

as open boxes, the content of which can be understood as in a continuous movement towards

each other.

Before starting to draw the boundaries of “who is in and who is out” in the domain of the

critical studies of security, it is important to deal with a famous missing: Constructivism (big

“c”) in International Relations. Indeed, despite the reflectivist ontology and epistemology that

this tradition shares with most critical research, it lacks the key concept that ties all the critical

approaches to security, which is the primacy of power as ordering principle among different

narratives. However, constructivism (small “c”) will be further used as a “method, or meta-

theory, about the way human society works” (Booth 2007, 5).

Let us begin then by disclosing the groundbreaking innovations developed by the members of

the Copenhagen School.

16

The Copenhagen School

In a famous and highly critical article issued on the Review of International Studies, Bill

McSweeney bestowed the appellation “Copenhagen School” on the group of scholars that

since the mid-1980s had been leading the research at the newly born Centre for Peace and

Conflict Research in Copenhagen (COPRI) (McSweeney 1996). Although the most renowned

contribution that this pool came up with is the concept of “securitization”, I prefer not to

identify the longstanding and rich work of the Copenhagen team with this only one reference.

This is the reason why I named this section after the artifact of “school” rather than the most

common categorization of “Securitization Theory” or “Securitization Studies” (Peoples and

Vaughan-Williams 2010, 76).

The year 1983 has undoubtedly been a landmark in the security studies research thanks to the

appearance of Barry Buzan’s “People, States and Fear”, considered the foundational work of

the Copenhagen School. Although the second edition issued in 1991 represents a more

complete account of Buzan’s thought because it includes considerations that could only be

inspired by the end of the Cold War, the central innovations brought by this text were already

at hand in the 1983 edition. Barry Buzan, who will later be project director of the COPRI

starting from 1988, broke in the tradition of strategic studies and security studies suggesting a

deepening and broadening of the concept of security beyond the long-established referent

object of the nation-state and the application of it only to the military sector (Buzan 1983).

Recognizing that “security is an essentially contested concept”, Buzan does not aim at solving

the conundrums posed by the idea of security but rather, he wants to explore them and

“thereby clarify the difficulties”. Such declaration of intent shows the nature of Buzan’s

effort, which is not a normative one but on the contrary represents a first attempt to disclose

the too often taken-for-granted concept of security as a simple, monolithic notion. Therefore,

Buzan moves towards a holistic understanding of security. In his own words:

4A more fitting expression is the one used by Jef Huysmans who defined the work of the Copenhagen School as a “creative development of a security studies agenda”, gathering under the attribute of creativity the many innovations that the research brought into the field. 5In order to avoid confusion about the contextual meaning of the expressions “deepening and broadening the concept of security”, it is recommendable to provide a definition of them. The ones proposed by Peoples and Williams seem to clearly capture the content: “The deepening of theoretical approaches relates to the idea that away from a narrow focus on the military sector to analysis of issues in other sectors (e.g. environmental, economic, political and societal spheres)" (People and Williams 2010).

17

The concept of security binds together individuals, states and international system so

closely that it demands to be treated in a holistic perspective. Although some sense can be

made of individual security, national security and international security, a full

understanding of each can only be gained if it is related to the other two (Buzan 1983,

11).

Categorizations are therefore useful as starting points of inquiry but they do not provide a

satisfactory analytical framework if taken separately. When it happens, the bigger picture that

brings to light the many contradictions which connect the three levels fades out and the

investigation’s outcome is irredeemably crippled.

It is paramount to take into account the grey interstices that exist between the three referent

objects and in order to do that it is necessary to problematize such objects: in the second

chapter of the book, for instance, the author deconstructs the concept of national security into

three different possible subjects that can be referred to as security issues: the idea of the state,

the institutions of the state and the physical base of the state. Buzan highlights that defending

the idea or the institutions of a state might easily lead to negatively affect the security of its

physical basis, which is the sum of the individuals that are recognized as citizens. Therefore,

not only is there an internal contradiction within the traditional concept of national security,

but it also clashes with another level of conceptualizing security, namely individual security.

This contradiction, however, in unavoidable because “is rooted in the nature of political

collectives” and in fact Buzan’s purpose is not to “reduce the other levels down to a basic

common denominator of individual security” (Buzan 1983, 65). His intention is rather to

recognize such incoherence while reaffirming the prominence of national and international

security.

Indeed, in the second edition of the book that dates back to 1991, Buzan brings about an

important integration between the state and the systemic level: the “Regional Security

Complex” (Buzan 1991). The focus here is narrowed down to regional subsystems and to the

relational nature of security: in a group of states located in proximity it is totally unrealistic to

consider their national security as one apart from the other. Natural outcome of international

anarchy, the security complex offers “a systemic approach to security analysis” that cuts

transversally among the three main levels of analysis: the macro level of the great powers’

impact on the subsystem, the middle level of the local state relations and the micro level of

domestic politics. With his moving away from a global security theory dominated by the great

powers while shifting the perspective towards a more significant consideration of smaller

18

regional actors, Buzan’s security complex “goes rather against the grain of the Anglo-

American analytical tradition in International Relations” (Buzan 1991, 263).

In the same years, while Barry Buzan’s was revising the first issue of “People, States and

Fear”, at the COPRI Ole Waever was working on the theorization of the concept of

securitization. It will appear clear from the following paragraphs that Waever’s and Buzan’s

“Copenhagen School” and not a “Securitization School”, being the first one generally more

used and comprehensive. Nevertheless, as we shall later see, the two scholars worked in many

common projects that spurred further the COPRI research.

In a working paper created for a Research Training Seminar in 1989, Ole Waever presented a

detailed account of his idea of security, which will later be synthesized in the concept of

securitization. It is very useful to look at it as a work-in-progress document while analyzing

his later academic production, since it provides a broad understanding of Waever’s theoretical

background.

The theoretical assumptions that frame Waever’s work draw primarily on the French post-

structuralism of Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, the way Waever conceives

security is founded on Derrida’s language theory:

What is then “security”? One can view security as that which is in language theory called

a speech act: it is not mainly interesting as a sign referring to something more real- it is

the utterance in itself that is the act: by saying it something is done (emphasis in the

original) (Waever 1989, 9).

By just “saying security” a state-representative moves an issue from the political level to a

domain of urgency, “claiming a special right to use the means necessary to block” what is

threatening the issue that needs to be protected (1989, 10). Once the subject is framed in such

way, it becomes “securitized”. The securitizing move is therefore a “textual” one: security is

not a phenomenon that exists independently outside of the human reality but is rather created

by the individuals’ language. To be sure, not all people can successfully securitize a matter: in

order to do so, one needs to be granted institutional power, in other words, needs to be “power

holder” (Waever 1998, 46). Only this way the representative can shape a security narrative

that will have the necessary strength to mobilize resources. Hence, the securitization of a

subject is intimately intertwined with politics and power.

19

Furthermore, it is important to highlight the nature of Waever‘s concept of securitization

within the realm of security theory. As argued in an explanatory article by Rita Taureck,

securitization theory offers a useful “tool for practical security analysis” where the main goal

is analytical (Taureck 2006, 54). Pointing out the investigative character of Waever’s concept

helps to fight those voices that raise “moral and ethical” criticism against securitization (2006,

53). A wrong view on securitization, such as Claudia Aradau’s, understands it as a “political

method”, “a technique of government” (Aradau 2001, 4). But Waever’s intention never was to

promote the securitization of an issue as an “ought-to-be” suggestion with a normative aim:

on the contrary, his proposition is to “desecuritize” and “minimize security” as much as

possible (Waever 1998, 40). The idea itself that security is nothing more than a speech act

shows the ontological value that such concept assumes in Waever’s speculation: security is

presented by power holders as concerning all people while it very often represents just the

elites’ interests (1998, 41). Therefore, many issues could be better dealt with if brought back

to the realm of normal politics rather than confined in a domain of exceptionality.

In Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de

Wilde incorporated the concept of securitization into a more comprehensive and systematized

volume presenting their innovative approach to security studies. Moving beyond Buzan’s

regional security complex theory, they go deep into one feature that was first introduced -

although rather superficially- by Buzan himself in “People, States and Fear”, namely the

broadening of the concept of security from a mere military domain to other sectors. The

importance of the traditional strategic studies dealing with military security is by no means

“what people are doing with the language by adding “security” onto sector designators”

(1998, 24). This way, it is possible to appreciate the “different qualities of security that are

sector, from the political to the economic arena. Despite the different referent objects and the

varied ways of responding to security issues in the many sectors, the authors’ conclusion is

that, “in political terms, there is one integrated field of security”. The overlap and interplay

between the different sectors should not be regarded as a major reason to “treat them in

isolation”, since this is the very essence of the widening of the concept of security: the

acknowledgement that the political world does not play the security card only in defense of

national sovereignty as it was in the past, but that such label is often impulsively and

superficially employed in political discourse to “raise the priority of a given issue in the

general political melee” (1998, 33).

20

The important innovations developed by the members of the Copenhagen School have been

valuable instruments to read the changing face of the security policies of the last two decades,

in particular at the European Union level. An example of application of the concept of

securitization will be provided in the last section of this chapter.

Post-structuralism and the Paris School

The application of the philosophical concepts of post-structuralism to the field of International

Relations and in particular to Security Studies dates back to the 1980s, when the first major

contributions appeared in North America. During the last decade, also as a consequence of the

great changes that followed 9/11, the post-structural influences in security studies have

evolved through the work of a group of researchers affiliated to the domain of International

Political Sociology and having their main base in Paris, from where the name Paris School.

The first part of this section will then review the basics of post-structuralism in security

studies through the most important works of some American scholars, while in the second

part an account of the Paris School led by Didier Bigo will be given in order to present some

theoretical tools that will be useful in the next chapters’ analysis.

Post-structuralist Approaches

The philosophical approach of post-structuralism (or, as used by some scholars as a single

word, poststructuralism) refers to the works of (mostly) French philosophers such as Pierre

Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan,

Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. To be sure, the scope of this review does not

allow for a complete compendium of the main innovations brought by the post-structuralist

e aim of this dissertation to discuss the most relevant

contributions to the topic.

Linking the suffix “post” to the term “structuralism” involves a linguistic move that finds its

meaning in the nature of post-structural speculation as a theoretical endeavor grafted on

Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural theory on language (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010,

21

63). Saussure’s main claim was that human beings do not understand the world in an

affirmative way, but rather by recognizing something in opposition to other things, in other

words, by saying what something is not. The structure of language is therefore according to

Saussure dominated by a relation of difference between the items and phenomena that we see

around us.

Jacques Derrida built on de Saussure’s theory of the structure of language by seeing the

oppositional relation as a way of “securing” meanings. Reflecting on a long time scale, he

argued that the Western thought always tried to anchor meanings to precise phenomena by

creating binary oppositions like self/other, man/woman, general/particular, true/false: the

meaning of each term of the couple intimately relies upon the existence of the other. However,

Derrida’s interest goes beyond the acknowledgment that oppositional pairs structure our

language and consequently our way of understanding reality. The purpose of his speculation is

to find a new way, that of “deconstruction”, to use as an analytical tool to break the artificially

created stability of meanings. The neologism “hauntology”, coined by the French philosopher

himself, named the focus of his research, which in opposition to the study of the “what is”, the

ontology, rather analyses the “what is not”: this explains the suffix “haunt-” as referring to

something that, like a specter, exists but is not blatantly visible. We could therefore look at

hauntology as what is “left out and excluded in order for meanings to be secured” (Peoples

and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 65).

Deconstruction is therefore a mode of thinking, one that “takes the instability of meaning as

its starting point in order to then trace attempts to securing it” (2010, 64). The virtue of

departing from an unstable ground is the possibility to open up to many more options that in

the dichotomy-based reading of reality is not allowed: we arrive this way to what was

mentioned in the introduction to this chapter as the “problematization” of taken-for-granted

certainties. Denaturalizing what up to now has been granted the quality of “truth” is then the

major task of all the intellectuals that wish to take the path of deconstructivism: in the field of

security studies, Richard Ashley, Michael Shapiro, James Der Derian and David Campbell

paved the way to such endeavor.

Equally important for the research of these scholars has been the influence of Michel

Foucault’s thought. Foucault went particularly deep into the analysis of the naturalization of

“regimes of truth”, revealing their contextual and historical foundation. He paid particular

attention to the set of practices that shape and reproduce one “discourse”, making it become a

meta-narrative that dominates over all the possible others. Central in Foucault’s thinking is the

22

power-knowledge nexus, which represents the core element to understand why and how one

narration can subjugate others and become “true”. This idea mirrors a conception of power

which is pervasive in every dimension of human life and represents the constitutive part of

every relation (2010, 65).

Through the power-knowledge nexus lenses, the IR post-structuralists read their long-

standing and resistant submission to the realist and positivist hegemony. First in this endeavor,

Richard Ashley charged the neorealists with the accusation of reproducing the domination of

only one type of knowledge within the international studies academic world in North America

(Ashley 1984, 228). Although recognizing that “neorealism is in many ways just one part of

the trend”, Ashley sheds light on the pretentious neorealist claim that its theoretical structure

is superior to any other alternative because it relies upon the scientific method. Here is exactly

where Ashley speaks out his very best critique against the power/knowledge relation on which

modernity has been built on: the ability of universalizing particularistic claims without

grasping their origin as mere reflection of some elite’s set of interests. In a nutshell, Ashley’s

critique moves against all “predominant understandings of method” that in virtue of their

purported objectivism “deflect criticism and obscure neorealism’s (or any other else) many

theoretical flaws” (1984, 243).

Just few years after Ashley’s groundbreaking article, Michael Shapiro and James Der Derian

edited a volume carrying an interesting and definitely innovative title.

International/Intertextual Relations introduced Roland Barthes’ idea of textuality to the

analysis of international politics, which back in the year of publication of the book (1989) was

still heavily involved in nuclear deterrence and end-of-Cold-War debates. The term textuality

that Shapiro and Der Derian borrowed from semiotics coveys a revolution in the way of

reading the world: textuality “embraces all dimensions of a text”, “it organizes anew our

vision of a text and constitutes a multifaceted basis for meaning-making” (Shapiro and Der

Derian 1989, 13). Understanding textuality means being aware that every discourse contains a

surplus meaning beyond the author’s intentional one. If this happens is because what the

author wants to express is enmeshed in an “ideological framework” that shapes the meaning

of the discourse in a way that it can be understood by all those that share the same set of

cultural “stock of signs” (Shapiro and Der Derian 1989, 2). Approaching the world as a text

that can be read in as many different ways as are the available cultural perspectives, enables

new readings of old concepts, first of all in this case, the discipline of International Relations

and the meaning of security (Der Derian 1989, 4). In the revelation of endless potential

alternatives and political solutions lies the emancipatory nature of the post-structuralist

23

thought. In spite of the many critiques that cannot grasp the constructive side of this approach,

it is

One that is self-reflective enough to show how meaning and writing practices are

radically entangled or one that tends to denaturalize familiar realities by employing

impertinent grammars and figurations, by, in short, making use of an insurrectional

textuality (emphasis added) (Shapiro 1989, 29).

Works like Shapiro and Der Derian’s have inspired a whole branch of security studies

research based on the analysis of discourse. Another significant contribution to the topic is

provided by David Campbell’s “Writing Security”. In 1992, right at the dawn of the post-Cold

War era, Campbell suggested a somewhat provocative examination of the conflict that had

just ended between the United States and the Soviet Union. In Campbell’s reading, the Cold

War has been a forty-year long reproduction of American and Soviet identities. The

opposition between the two super powers would be in his idea the most powerful way to

constantly reaffirm the significant relations of Self/Other, identity/difference that create and

help to keep stable the identity of a state (Campbell 1992, 9). A substantial part of what

defines the distinctiveness of a nation is represented by the dangers that it has to tackle: but,

as the author puts it, “danger is not an objective condition” (1992, 2). The notion of risk is

socially constructed, it is not independent from the individuals that assess it, but still the

dangers that are said to threaten the security of a state easily undergo a procedure of

crystallization that grants them the quality of objective threats. During the Cold War,

Campbell argues, the USA shaped an identity discourse constructed on the American

diametrical distance from the typical features of the Soviet Union, which embodied the threat

par excellence. They were, in this way, “writing security”.

The Paris School

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks that hit the USA in 2001, the bulk of the post-structural

research agenda in the field of security studies moved across the ocean and set its headquarter

at SciencesPo. Paris. In fact, the Parisian research shows a clearly European signature and the

points of distance from the American post-structuralist branch are significant. What came to

be called the Paris School combines the post-structuralist thoughts of (mainly) Pierre

Bourdieu and Michel Foucault with a sociological perspective towards security, which

awarded the group the academic label of International Political Sociology (IPS). Indeed, one

24

could find in the greater attention on practices rather than only language the main point of

separation from the authors that have just been reviewed (therefore, the IPS scholars will

naturally draw on Foucault more than Derrida and Barthes) . The same remark could be made

about the proximity between the Paris School and the Copenhagen School: despite the

acceptance of the concept of securitization as a theoretical cornerstone, the Paris group rejects

the Danish exclusive interest for speech acts as securitizing moves.

In the literature produced by the Paris research team, the term “security” always comes

together with his opposite “insecurity”. In this feature lies one of the main innovations

brought by the team led by Didier Bigo: that is to say, the naming of a phenomenon that,

although considered by the other critical theorists, never found the recognition in a name.

With the word “insecurity”, the IPS names the effect that the process of securitization

in the realm of security that is operated at the institutional level impacts on the societal milieu

by engendering a growing perception of insecurity about that subject.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, Paris disagrees with Copenhagen about the empirical

apparatus that generates effective securitizations. Discursive practices are not sufficient

without “the conditions of possibility for the performativity of these narratives”, meaning that

in order for a speech to successfully produce a securitizing move it needs to be embedded in a

system of practices that would allow it to become true (Balzacq et al. 2010, 3). The object of

research is therefore expended to encompass discursive and non-discursive practices, which

together refer to the concept of governmentality. Drawing on Foucault and adapting his notion

to the research on security, Bigo et al. study governmentality as a sociological structure based

on three main factors: the field, the habitus and the dispositif. The “field” is the empirical

social space where practices occur and agents of all kind are located in different social

positions. In this field, the “habitus” is represented by the set of dispositions that are reiterated

on the agents and by the agents and, as a result, govern the behaviors within the social ground.

The practices can travel among fields, acquiring a transversality which can be defined as

dispositif: to say it with Foucault, a “dispositif” is “the system of relations that can be

established between all the elements” previously mentioned-

the ensemble of relations of “power and resistance”, which is inherent in every larger social

and political space (Foucault 1980, quoted in Balzacq 2010, 3).

The bulk of the theoretical innovation formulated by Bigo and his team lies in the

revolutionary understanding of the relation between internal and external security of the state

25

-

-

-

-

-

26

that will follow in the next chapters. Despite the great need for a deeper understanding of the

subject, the scope of this section does not leave space for further speculation. Therefore, a

closer look to the concepts and tools provided by the IPS will be given in the next chapter.

The Welsh School

If we were to call this branch of the critical research on security with the name used by its

members, we should title this section “Critical Security Studies”. However, for the sake of

general but quite specific name of “Welsh School”. It must be acknowledged, however, that if

one of the many branches of the critical studies on security deserved the (capitalized)

appellation of Critical Security Studies, this would be the Welsh School. In fact, the work of

Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones, central figures of the school, addresses the issue of

applying the Critical Theory as conceived by the Frankfurt School to the studies on security.

When talking about the Welsh School -also called the Aberystwyth School- the term

“critical” assumes a more specific meaning than we have used until now. As Robert Cox, one

of the founding fathers of the Critical International Theory, has pointed out, a theory that is

“critical” is located in direct opposition to one that is “problem-solving” oriented (Cox 1981,

129). As in the outstanding work of the Frankfurters, a critical examination of society and

power is one that digs deeply into the societal dynamics in order to sort out new possibilities

for emancipation. Key concept of every application of Critical Theory, emancipation is of

paramount importance since it outlines the close relationship between Critical Theory and

Marxism. Unlike the theories analyzed in the two previous sections thus, the speculation of

the Welsh School aspires to establish a normative theoretical ground for change. To epitomize 6The Frankfurt School is a philosophical movement born in Germany in the 1920s. Directed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the school gave birth to the well-known Critical Theory of Society. Important contributors of the Frankfurt School throughout the XX century have also been Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Alex Honneth, Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck. As it will be discussed through this section, some of them have had a strong influence on the research of Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones. 7In fact, the research of the Welsh School is mostly clustered in one institute in Wales, the Aberystwyth University. The history of this institution does not pass without notice since it is in Aberystwyth that the first professorship of International Relation was established in 1919, under the name of Woodrow Wilson Chair. Furthermore, world famous IR scholars have been presidents of the Department of International politics, such as, among others, E.H. Carr.

27

such call for action, it is sufficient to quote one of Marx’s most famous utterances, one that

could never miss in any critical theorist’s piece: “The philosophers have only interpreted the

nt is to change it” (Marx 1845).

In the introduction to his latest book “Theory of World Security”, Ken Booth claims with

Hannah Arendt that “we all have only one real thought in our lives” (Booth 2007, 4) that can

be inflect in thousands different ways but always stands firm in our intentions. For the Welsh

scholar the fil rouge of his long academic career is the ambition to create a world where

“people can live in reasonable equality” and can conduct their “intimate and collective lives in

dignity, freedom and hope” (2007, 5). Disregarding the risk of sounding simplistic, Booth has,

on the contrary, repeatedly argued against the common rebuttal of the adjective “utopian”

among the International Relations academia. Willing to restore the reputation of this way of

thinking, he named his understanding of international politics “Utopian Realism” (Booth

1991a, 1991b). To be a utopian realist means being able to reason in empirical terms without

dismissing the normative ambition. The practical element of the label drags the thinker down

on the ground of the everyday life and therefore allows him to reach a “fuller understanding

of the forces shaping ‘who gets what, when and how’”(Booth 1991a, 534). But the utopian

factor sets the bar high enough to represent the aim towards which the product of his

speculation should move. The utopia Booth envisions is not a revolutionary one that justifies

the means to reach its ends, but rather a practical tool to employ within the process of

academic production.

In his chapter on Critical Security Theory in the book edited by Keith Krause and Michael

Williams after the 1994 York Conference, Ken Booth meditates on the role of the intellectual,

in his case of the political scientist, within society (Booth 1997). Promoting a powerful

reflectivist view, the Aberystwyth professor sees the impossibility for a fully objective and

dispassionate theory. Instead, research is always permeated by one’s beliefs and convictions

and in his specific case, the role he want to personify is that of an “organic intellectual”.

Borrowing the concept from Antonio Gramsci, an organic intellectual is one that works

among the people and for the people, thus bringing back the long stigmatized category of

ethics within the world of politics as a vector for research.

In fact, after an intense academic career in the traditionalist field of strategic studies, Ken

Booth found the content of his utopia in the close relation between security and emancipation.

In his own words:

28

Emancipation means freeing people from those constraints that stop them carrying out

what freely they would choose to do, of which war, poverty, oppression and poor

education are a few. Security and emancipation are in fact two sides of the same coin. It is

emancipation, not power and order, in both theory and practice, that leads to stable

security (Booth 1991a, 539).

Binding together security and emancipation clearly deviates Booth’s understanding of security

from the traditional state-centric conception of it. The referent object of security becomes then

the individual, and its outreach is extended to all humanity. Such critical idea of security

would merge the “top-down northern national security and the bottom-up southern view of

comprehensive security concerned with problems arising out of underdevelopment or

oppression” (Booth 1991b, 322). Security stops then being just about survival and rather

defines a condition of absence of any kind of threat that hinders the development of a full,

good life. Such argument makes Ken Booth come somewhat close to Waever’s idea of a

negative reading of security: in a way, what the first calls emancipation is what the second

refers to as absence of need for security. Thus, Booth’s emancipation could be read as

emancipation from security.

To be sure then, Booth’s idea is framed within a broader, new reading of international politics.

Already in 1991, the Welsh scholar was appreciating the unleash of globalization as an

opportunity to create a “post-foreign policy world”, where the growing space for individual

action would tie the civil societies divided until now into one single global human community

(Booth 1991a, 544).

Although Richard Wyn Jones owes much of his theoretical production to the supervision of

his mentor Ken Booth, he nevertheless developed his research towards a closer relation with

the very core of Critical Theory, drawing directly on some of the most valuable contributions

of the Frankfurter philosophers. Particular attention is paid by Jones to the academic

production of the second generation of Critical theorists, namely Alex Honneth, Jürgen

Habermas and above all Ulrich Beck.

One central topic of Richard Wyn Jones’ research is the location of the emancipatory

potential. Rejecting both the traditional Marxist idea of emancipation as “socialization of

production”, shared by Horkheimer and Adorno, and that of “communicative action” as

promoted by Habermas and Honneth, Wyn Jones turns to Ulrich Beck’s speculation, finding

in it a fitter theory for an adaptation to the studies on security. Indeed, Beck suggests a more

“sociologically and politically focused” understanding of emancipation that is exemplified in

29

his theory of “risk society”. In Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity issued in 1992, the

German scholar introduces a new understanding of the post-industrial society where

technological evolution has engendered the occurrence of new threats to the individuals,

concurring to create a general perception of risk (Beck 1992). Most insecurity is produced by

the man-made attacks against the natural world that have caused, in the last three centuries,

irreparable harms to the environment. For this reason, Beck talks of an “ecological

enlightenment” as the aim of his emancipatory project. In concrete terms, such political plan

would entail the promotion of a radical democratization, by means of two sets of reforms:

first, one recognizing the changing nature of the political process by qualifying those non-

state actors that have been gaining effective power to the detriment of the state’s governments

would locate the control of technology in the hands of society, as opposed to the current

monopoly of it by restricted elites (Beck 1992, 233). By socializing the tools that, if misused,

could lead to situations of insecurity, Beck promotes an updated version of the traditional

Marxist idea that emancipation is achieved when society can manage on her own what could

otherwise produce alienation and insecurity, that is the (technological) material production.

Wyn Jones’ endorsement of Beck’s theorization proves the intention of the Welsh intellectual

to give practical meaning to the concept of emancipation, which still in Booth does not find

any attempt to become praxis. Emancipatory possibilities cannot be properly figured out

without a reconceptualization of strategy (Wyn Jones 1999, 111). A critical approach to

strategy would imply a new understanding of technology tailored on a dialectical dimension

with culture, in line with the tradition of the Frankfurt School. In fact, what we commonly

identify with military technology is so because embedded in a cultural system that looks at

improvements of science as more and more efficient ways to cause slaughters and harm

(1999, 109). Hence, in virtue of this socially constructed nature of the negative use of

technology as tools of destruction, this fetishism can undergo a process of denaturalization

from where a positive cultural reconstruction of the employment of technology can begin and

become a mode of social emancipation.

The achievements of the Aberystwyth School are far reaching and thanks to their thrust

towards change provide a concrete normative alternative to much of the traditionalist agenda

on security. It is my belief that the “message in the bottle” sent by Horkheimer and Adorno in

the “Dialectic of the Enlightenment” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979), as also much of the

production of Herbert Marcuse, might still represent a rich source of inspiration for further

developments of an idea of security tied to emancipation.

30

Post-colonialist Perspectives

As every artificial container, also the works that claim an affiliation to the broader movement

of post-colonialism present an extremely diverse range of contributions. Indeed, most self-

proclaimed post-colonialist scholars cannot agree still on what such label should signify. The

only way to get an idea of how post-colonialism could be a useful theoretical tool for the

development of the critical studies on security is to provide a review of the main academic

inflections that such thought has created in the last two decades.

Together with Amitav Acharya, Mohammed Ayoob was granted the membership of the large

team of critical theorists in security studies after participating to the already mentioned 1994

York Conference and being published in the following edited book that summed up some of

the new views presented at the event. In the article included in the volume, A Subaltern

Realist Perspective (Ayoob 1997) Ayoob reveals his idea of security from the unique

standpoint of “subaltern realism”. To grasp the meaning of such innovative category, it is

necessary to disentangle the two components of the label. The word “subaltern” makes a

direct reference to the Subaltern School of History (mainly located in India) that draws

primarily on the original Gramscian concept of subalternity. Provided that the term identifies

the poor and the voiceless in history, such historical branch focuses on the oppression and

forgetfulness that these people have undergone by Western “elitist historiography” (1997,

141). Translated in International Relations language, the subalterns become the Third World

countries. More security related, the term “realist” just means what most IR disciples think of,

when mentioning the word, that is to say the theoretical line of classical realism.

Ayoob’s Subaltern Realism cries out a pledge for attention to the needs of the Third World

countries. The main critique that he moves towards a Western-hegemonized understanding of

security is the singling out external threats as the only ones that can attempt to the security of

the state. Instead, the main concerns of Third World countries come from internal issues and

such claim is numerically supported by the greater incidence of intrastate over interstate

conflicts during the second half of the twentieth century, data that have passed under silence

because of the Eurocentric dominance in the IR field (1997, 122).

The concept of security that Ayoob promotes therefore is neither one that broadens the amount

of fields of application nor one that shifts the referent object from the state to society or the

individual. Despite recognizing the importance of providing safety and development to

31

society, this level is fully subordinated to the “political realm” of state stability and security

(1997, 137). The security Ayoob is seeking to affirm aims at gaining full self-determination

through the establishment of a strong state that can face both external and internal threats.

Indeed, such an outlook has provoked not few criticisms towards Ayoob, who seems to be

careless of whether the regime authority of these states might endanger the lives of their

citizens as often happens (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 60).

Amitav Acharya’s participation at the 1994 York Conference provided the participants with a

different understanding of a post-colonialist outlook on security. Taking part of the broad

branch of the security studies that aims at redefining the concept of security in the post-Cold

War era, Acharya maintains that the experience of the Third World can be a useful starting

point to develop the research. The data that follow the dissolution of the Soviet Union shed

light on the striking increase of civil, intrastate or regional conflicts, towards which the old

notion of security loses its hermeneutical strength (Acharya 1997, 300). In fact, although little

internationally and academically advertised, such category of wars has been the dominant one

in the Third World regions since the end of World War II. Therefore, by looking at the

meaning of security in the Southern “segment”, it is possible to read the new reality through

an expanded idea of what security might take in these situations (1997, 300). According to

Acharya, the Southern experience challenges the Northern monopoly of state security in three

important points: the definition of security as state security and as military security and the

questioning of the viability of the old superpower structure as the current ruling international

system (1997, 301).

What Acharya stresses about state security is the very small applicability of the concept when

taking into account the whole world and not only the Western democracies. In fact, national

security is problematic when attached to weak states where most of the time their regimes do

not aim at pursuing the best for the population but rather set themselves against it (1997, 303).

Acharya suggests with Ayoob that the state is not a safe haven that needs to be protected from

outside threats but on the contrary its inside segments can represent the very origin of many

conflicts. Often, these in-state fractures are caused by developmental issues that directly affect

the security of the state population and can in no way be tackled with the intervention of the

military. Therefore, the security box is opened to welcome inside it other dimensions such as

economic, identity and societal issues.

Finally, the emergence of the Third World questions the nowadays validity of the international

system as we know it, dominated by the superpowers and reflecting the neorealist

32

assumptions of the interstate structure. In fact, the focus on the superpowers’ relations

dismisses the involvement of the developing countries in the international bargaining process:

during the Cold War, attention was paid to the Southern regions only when the superpowers’

interests were at stake. The changed face of the world power relations requires a sharper

attention to the dynamics of regional security and drawing on the experience of the Third

World countries in the topic is fundamental to pursue a deeper and constructive analysis of

today’s world (1997, 307).

Despite the label “post-colonial” however, neither Ayoob nor Acharya actually employ the

term as referring to the philosophical branch of the Post-colonial Studies. More recently,

Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey have made an attempt to read the post- 9/11 world politics

through the lenses of post-colonialism as theorized by Bhabha, Spivak and Chakrabarty.

Barkawi and Laffey are persuaded that the success of the Al-Qaeda terrorist attacks that have

hit at the heart the Western security brings about a “post-colonial moment in security studies”

(Barkawi and Laffey 2006). However, while the South speaks up and gains momentum to

finally (and tragically) vindicate the oppression that the North has perpetrated for centuries on

it, the West manages once again to hegemonize the political narrative and transform such

violent pledges for resistance in illegitimate actions. Barkawi and Laffey’s core argument is

hence that, by labeling the Al-Qaeda attacks as terrorist, the Western world delegitimizes

every claim it makes, because terrorism always ends up being considered an unjustified

violent action. Indeed, this assumption rests at the core of the traditional Western

understanding of security, which considers inter-state wars as the only legitimate (and

internationally regulated) form of violence, banishing “small and asymmetrical wars” in the

category of evil, illicit warfare (2006, 332). The authors continue claiming that, despite the

attempt of the North to cover up the relative fairness of the Southern demands, after 9/11 the

world political balance has indeed changed and the old classic logic that neatly excluded the

Third World in block can no longer provide an effective description of reality (2006, 330). In

line with the two previously mentioned scholars, Barkawi and Laffey attack the ubiquitous

presence of Eurocentrism that has affected every single feature of the international relations

among North and South, beginning with the conception of security. Therefore, in order to

have an analytical apparatus that allows us to comprehend the current world with open and

8In philosophy, the Post-colonialist movement claims to voice the experiences of oppression of the “subjugated” in the colonial/post-colonial history. Conflating the two philosophical traditions of post-structuralism and Marxism, post-colonialists draw on both the Derridean notion of narratives and the Gramscian concepts of “subalternity” and “hegemony”. Main representatives of this group are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bahaba and Gayatri Chakraavorty Spivak.

33

lucid eyes, we need to get rid of the overshadowing traditional Eurocentric view of security

(2006, 333).

With its innovative and unconventional theoretical framework, the post-colonial philosophical

tradition can still spur further research on critical perspectives of security. In my perspective,

the bulk of future developments will involve the post-modern conviction of the obsolescence

-colonialists might finally free themselves

from the Eurocentric political product par excellence, the nation state, and explore alternative

ways of thinking the political space.

Feminist and Gender Outlooks on Security

Since the 1990s, the feminist and gender thoughts have permeated the field of security studies

providing an original insight of the concept. As for every previous theoretical branch

reviewed in this chapter, the gender studies contributions to the rethinking of security are

widely diverse: indeed, they mainly follow the theoretical divisions that are adopted in the

realm of Western philosophy. To give a concise but satisfactory account of the gender

perspectives on security it will be then of primary importance to outline the three main

directions that this thought has evolved to, through a short analysis of the authors and works

that represent these approaches in a clear and direct fashion.

If we were to differentiate the many perspectives on gender in International Relations and

more specifically on security, we could follow three main lines: liberal feminism, standpoint

feminism and poststructuralist feminism (Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 34). The most

representative work of the liberal feminist approach to International Relation and security

studies is Cynthia Enloe’s famous volume Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist

Sense of International Relations -breaking analysis, Enloe

strongly affirms that “the personal is political” also at the international level. By saying this

the American scholar crosses the boundaries between private and public life, arguing that “the

relationships we once imagined were private or merely social are in fact infused with power,

usually unequal power backed up by public authority” (Enloe 2000, 195). To shed light on the

role of women in the international environment, Enloe examines a very specific locus, that of

the US military bases around the world. Her claim is that the reproduction of gendered labor

34

divisions inside the bases, anchored on the ideas of masculinity and femininity, help creating a

fictional “normality” within the military camps (2000, 69). As a consequence, in an

international security perspective, such pattern reiterates the essentialized connection between

domestic level and femininity on one side, and international sector and masculinity on the

other.

However, despite the recognition of relations of power that subjugates women both at the

personal and political level, Enloe’s analysis is deeply rooted in philosophical liberalism and

political realism. Adopting the realist perspective of a given global reality where power

politics is the best way to face contingencies, all she argues for is a rehabilitation of the

female sex in the international political and economic arena, in a way that enables them to

reach the same level of their male counterparts. As Jill Steans has pointed out, this “add

women and stir” approach does not do any good to women since it essentializes the gender

categories and takes for granted a realist outlook on international politics that is entirely built

on patriarchal assumptions (Steans 2009, quoted in Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 38).

Just few years after the publication of Banana, Beaches and Bases, J. Ann Tickner suggested

a different idea of gender in international politics that was later named “standpoint feminism”.

Focusing on empirical experiences of women in the field of IR, the feminist scholar goes

deeper than Enloe in the analysis of the construction of international political categories.

Feminist Perspectives on achieving Global Security (1992) digs into the process of formation

of the traditional concepts of international relations and discovers their close tie with the

features of masculinity. Combining the binary distinction of male/female to the dichotomy of

inside/outside of the nation state, Tickner argues that the international portrayal of the nation

state strongly rests on the characteristics of what masculinity is commonly thought to be:

strength, confidence, power and independence (Tickner 1992, 2). As a counterpart, the inside

of the nation state (not accidentally called “domestic”), which equates with the population, is

what needs to be protected because is intrinsically weak, irrational and unable to defend itself.

Such set of attributes are generally attached to the idea of femininity. Therefore, fighting for a

better appreciation of the role of women in the security studies, as promoted by Enloe, is not

enough: the patriarchal nature of the national/international spheres is so deeply embedded in

the Western culture that without a global rethinking of these political categories, women will

never be able to gain the place they deserve in the world. In fact, the few women that have

been accepted in the “realm” of international politics, such as Jean Kirkpatrick and (we shall

add) Condoleeza Rice, succeeded because of their masculine attributes (1992, 7). From here,

Tickner moves a step forward suggesting that the entrance of women in the security domain

35

might spur a radical change in the way of dealing with conflict and security. What she claims

is the chance that by bringing the women-like softness and original thinking inclination into

the classical power politics, new scope for peaceful conflict resolutions and alternative roads

to security could be achieved (1992, 63).

Scholars belonging to the field of poststructuralist feminism generally criticize J. Ann Tickner

for stopping at the door of a real problematization of gender and sex. As every good follower

of the Derridean thought, the representatives of this way to feminism aim at making the very

categories of womanhood and manhood just shaky and unstable signifiers (Peoples and

Vaughan-Williams 2010, 41). A very significant contribution to the topic is represented by

Gender, Violence and Security by Laura J. Shepherd (2008). Building her research on Judith

Butler’s idea that gender is socially constructed through practice and performativity, Shepherd

argues that the gender categories of woman and man are produced by reiteration (Shepherd

2008, 1). Her research on security focuses on the forms of violence that are perpetrated

towards women. The approach to violence is however an usual one: shifting from the

traditional understanding of the term as “functional mechanism within an anarchic

international system”, violence rather is conceived by Shepherd as an instrument that creates

and reproduces gender subjectivities or better, to say it with Butler, “emerges from a profound

desire to keep the binary order of gender natural or necessary” (2008, 2). To find empirical

support to her thesis, the scholar takes as a case study the UN Council Resolution (UNSC)

1325 adopted in 2000 with “the aim of ensuring that all efforts towards peace-building and

post-conflict reconstruction, as well as the conduct of arm conflict itself, would entail

sensitivity towards gendered violence and gendered inequalities” (2008, 6). The question she

addresses is about the discursive production of the concept of international security and the

notion of gendered violence through the work of a major international organization such as

the UN. The conclusions drawn by her empirical study lead her to assess the UNCS 1325 as

being a document that holds a productive force in reproducing the primarily importance for

international security of both state building and mainstream gender categories (2008, 7).

It is hard at this point to give a final, general account of the feminist contributions to the

reconceptualization of security. Certainly, the poststructuralist approach à la Shepherd

innovates the research by rethinking security through the deconstruction of one of its possible

referent object, women. Following this path, the future research will provide the security

studies field with newer and original perspectives.

36

Fields of Application of the Critical Studies on Security

Like every theory, the Critical Studies on Security need an empirical ground on which to

prove their applicability. The issues that the critical scholars have examined from their

specific theoretical perspectives are many and broadly diverse. To be sure, if we were to

create a matrix with all the different critical approaches in rows and the topics analyzed

through the critical lenses in column, the outcome would be a very complex and (most

certainly) chaotic one.

Therefore, let us review just few examples that properly show the impact that a critical

understanding of security can have on the analysis of current issues in international politics.

The first subsection will deal with the topic of migration and border control, making further

way in the last part for a brief account of the application of Critical Studies to the question of

terrorism.

Migrations and Border Control

In front of the undeniable increase of migration fluxes towards the First World countries after

the collapse of the URSS and the subsequent dissolution of the two closed blocks that had

dominated the Cold War for half a century, the West has begun a reconceptualization of

migrations as a matter of security. A great deal of the critical production on security has

indeed focused on the cooptation of the theme of migration within the security policies of the

nation state. First and foremost, the Copenhagen School has suggested reading the way the

European states deal with migration as a process of securitization. The securitization theory

promoters read the widespread negative perception of the arrival of immigrants into the

European national borders and the further securitization of the topic as a defensive scheme to

respond to the threats that migration from non-Western countries can cause to society (Buzan

et al. 1998). As from the Copenhagen School’s attempt to broaden the concept of security,

society becomes one of the sectors that can possibly be affected by security threats. The main

referent object threatened in the societal domain is identity: the arrival of people coming from

different religious, cultural and educational backgrounds attack the homogeneity of the

national population, setting relations based on binary oppositions such as “us and them” and

“citizens and foreigners” (1998, 123). The fear that the “different other” could corrupt

37

irremediably the values and the interests of the state and its population makes the question of

migration a matter of security.

Great attention has also been paid by critical theorists to border control and security.

Particularly relevant for the topic is the work of Didier Bigo within the research of the Paris

School (or International Political Sociology). Taking the European Union as the geographical

and political referent of his research, Bigo argues that the old distinction between external and

internal state security is no longer effective in the old continent, and rather the two

dimensions are deeply intertwined (Bigo 2000). As a consequence of new forms of

transnational government, the concepts of sovereignty, territory and security have been

destabilized and borders have been displaced to shape a new, transversal field of (in)security

that assures the provision of security for some at the expenses of some others. Therefore, the

porosity of the borders caused by the European internal mobility has a natural counterpart in

the development of methods of surveillance, identification, “profiling, containment, and

detention of foreigners” that make the movement within the EU secure and completely free

(Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2010, 138).

Terrorism

Being one of the most debated topics of the last decade, terrorism could not be exempted from

a detailed critical scrutiny. However, differently from migration and border control, terrorism

is not an issue that can be easily problematized because of the violent content that most of the

time its actions entail.

Since 2008, the academic journal Critical Studies on Terrorism gathers many diverse

scholarly contributions that attempt to deconstruct the powerful narrative against terrorism

that the Western World has built after 9/11, promoting a more self-reflective approach to the

study of the topic (Breen Smyth et al. 2008). In the introduction to the first edition of the

journal, Marie Breen Smyth et al. acknowledge the difficulty of pursuing a self-reflective

research on terrorism in a political and academic context that has made this form of violence a

“negative ideograph of Western identity”. They are nonetheless determined to dig inside what

looks like a paradoxical question: what charges with so much value a bunch of violent attacks

that cause maximum few thousands casualties per year over the entire world? In no way this

is an insensitive lack of appreciation for the losses of human lives, but rather this question

38

focuses on the discursive nature of terrorism and what lies behind the politicization of this

concept (2008, 2).

A brief example of how terrorism could be deconstructed was already provided in the section

about Post-colonialist contributions to security, through the study made by Barkawi and

Laffey, who read terrorism as the latest attempt of the West to delegitimize every resistance

coming from the Third World.

Another interesting contribution comes from Michael Stohl. Analyzing the terrorist attack par

excellence, 9/11, the UCSB professor shifts the focus of attention from the violent action itself

to the amplified impact that it had on society and world politics. Indeed, in his own words,

“terrorism remains communicatively constituted violence in which how the audience reacts,

and the political effects of the reactions, are the core process of terrorism” (Stohl 2008, 13).

As for many other events of different nature, terrorism is then not about the deed but about the

narration that is created around it and in the particular case of 9/11, the way the US

government has used the fact to pursue a tight policy of liberties restriction and to reaffirm

internationally the strength of the United States.

Exploring a Critical Understanding of Transnational Organized Crime

The next chapter of this dissertation will attempt to provide a critical analysis of the

phenomenon of transnational organized crime (TOC). Among the several approaches of the

Critical Studies on Security, the ones offered by the Copenhagen School and by the Paris

School will prove to be the most useful to examine and deconstruct the official narration on

TOC. In the following pages I will therefore present the general discourse on organized crime

as it was born in the USA, the way it was granted international recognition after the Cold War

and how it started to be perceived as a transnational threat to security. The third chapter will

then analyse the case of the European Union as one of the main regions where the

securitization of TOC has taken place.

39

Chapter 2. Critical Perspectives on Transnational Organized Crime

Introduction

In times of globalization, Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) is the new label officially

attached to the old phenomenon of Organized Crime. Undoubtedly, the attention paid to the

topic has incrementally grown starting from the end of the 1980s, as proved by the great

resonance that most international organizations (e.g. the United Nations), soft-law gatherings

(e.g. G8, G20) and regional institutions (e.g. the European Union) have given to the issue. The

topic is indeed of great relevance for the academic world of security studies because of its

thematization as an important new threat to the security of the state and in general to the

globalized world.

The mainstream rhetoric on the phenomenon of Transnational Organized Crime finds its

origins in the dissolution of the Soviet block and the consequential defrosting of the borders

that had been tightly sealed during the Cold War. Officially, the big picture portrays well-

organized and well-established national crime syndicates that greatly benefited from the

loosening of borders’ control and could finally gain momentum in an expanded global market,

eager for their illegal goods. From their alleged ability to easily cross all national boundaries

comes the quality of transnationality, which represents the first step towards a potential

underground criminal merge that seriously threatens the legitimate system on the surface.

The truth claims made by politicians and agents engaged in the fight against TOC have not

escaped the scrutiny of the critical thinkers. Among the voices of the Critical Studies on

Security, some scholars from the poststructuralism-based schools of Copenhagen and Paris

have attempted to provide an alternative understanding of the subject. Building on the concept

of (in)securitization of Transnational Organized Crime, they approach the current political

view on the topic as a meta-narrative created by speech acts and practices that can be properly

analyzed as such and deconstructed. However, the critical approach to TOC does not only

belong to the International Relations domain. Rather, probably the most enriching critical

literature about TOC comes from the criminological field. As for the studies on security

40

discussed in the previous chapter, Critical Criminology questions systematically the taken-for-

granted assumptions of traditional, positivist criminology, in an attempt to shift the

criminological perspective from a merely problem-solving angle to one that aims at

understanding the inner dysfunctions of society that lead individuals to commit criminal

actions.

Interestingly, so far the research from the Critical Studies on Security has not paid any

attention to the valuable contributions of the criminological sector. In fact, the security

scholarships dealing with Transnational Organized Crime could benefit from an overture

towards the criminological achievements on the subject. Therefore, in the scope of this

chapter, I will suggest a critical approach to TOC that, adopting a general point of view of

Critical Studies on Security, will also include some major contributions from Critical

Criminology. In particular the works of Letizia Paoli, Adam Edwards, Michael Woodiwiss,

Peter Gill, J. Shepticky and Robert Reiner will show to be a useful resource to thoroughly

analyse the phenomenon of Transnational Organized Crime.

The speculation of the Critical Studies on Security deals with the development of the

ith the

needed clarity, it is necessary to provide an overview of how and where the concept of

Organized Crime has been created by political discourse and how it has evolved during the

XX Century, becoming in the post-Cold War a transnational phenomenon. To date, Michael

Woodiwiss and Holger Stritzel have written the most brilliant reconstruction of the

narrativization of organized crime and, therefore, the first section of this chapter will draw on

their works. Following this somewhat historical part, the second paragraph will review the

critical approaches to TOC provided by the CSS, particularly through the voices of Didier

with the parallel critical criminologists’ contributions on the topic all along the chapter. The

third section will leave space to those criminological views that offer alternative

understandings of the subject and on which the field of security studies could draw to expand

its agenda on Transnational Organized Crime towards a constructive reading of the

phenomenon.

41

A Critical History of the Concept of Organized Crime

The central argument developed by Mike Woodiwiss in many of his works is that the concept

of TOC has its origins in the American political and cultural discourse over organized crime

European Union, never suggested their own views and implemented their policies to fight

TOC, but rather that the very conceptualization of the nature of organized crime, of how it

works and what it represents for Western societies is deeply rooted in the narration shaped by

American politicians and agents starting from the 1920s and broadly mediatized until

becoming an important trait of Western popular culture.

In a nutshell, the American understanding of organized crime and transnational organized

crime is that of a Mafia-type organization, that is a structured and well-coordinated system

aiming at making profits. The underground maneuvers of the crime syndicates are

conceptualized as an exogenous power that attacks and damages “an otherwise satisfactory

political economy” (Woodiwiss 2003, 9). Moreover, all criminal organizations have a specific

ethnical origin. When analyzing the US narration on TOC, we will find it filled with

references to the Italian Mafia ( the so-called La Cosa Nostra), the Japanese Yakuza, the

Chinese Triads, the Mexican Cartels, and later on the many criminal groups from the states

born after the dissolution of the ex USSR. To use Woodiwiss’ own expression, we could call

such image of organized crime the “alien conspiracy theory” (2003, 17).

Parallel to Woodiwiss’ criminological analysis on the topic runs Holger Stritzel’s securitarian

approach to the American conceptualization of TOC (Stritzel 2012). Drawing heavily on the

concepts of securitization and intertextuality, Stritzel adds to Woodiwiss’ examination a finer

attention to the security dimension, focusing in particular on the entanglement of security and

cultural/media discourses on organized crime. Therefore, the following will compound the

two analyses in order to provide a complete overview of the subject.

The first time American academia approached organized crime as a topic deserving analytical

examination was, rightly, during the 1920s, while the US was experiencing a moment of harsh

9As briefly mentioned in the first chapter, the concept of “intertextuality” rests on the post-structuralist idea that the meaning of a discourse depends on its relation to another discourse. In this specific case, Stritzel highlights the “high degree of synchronic and diachronic intertextuality in the form of various linkages between political, literary, media, academic, cinematographic discourse” (Stritzel 2012, 550).

42

prohibition, generating a fast increase in demand of illegal goods. Back then, criminal

organizations were not invested with the loaded meaning that the

rather looked at as “systematic criminal activities” practicing “racket” but neither tied to any

specific social group nor alien to the legal society. Indeed, as in 1941 Alfred Lindesmith put

it: “Organized crime requires the active and conscious co-operation of a number of elements

of respectable society” (Lindesmith 1941, quoted in Woodiwiss 2003, 14). Some

commentators such as Walter Lippmann, even portrayed a conception of organized crime that

will be totally disregarded later in history and that nowadays would be considered “critical”,

which is one suggesting “that organized crime was one of the unfortunate products of

unfettered capitalism” (Woodiwiss 2003, 14).

The Kefauver Commission and the “Alien Conspiracy Theory”

The big turn in the understanding of organized crime in the United States arrived at the

beginning of the 1950s, when a Senate committee chaired by Estes Kefauver was established

with the task of pursuing “a full and direct study and investigation of interstate gambling and

racketeer activity” (Congressional Record 1950, quoted in Stritzel 2012, 557). The outcome

of the investigation of the Kefauver Commission would have a durable impact on the

American perception of organized crime: abandoning any reference to the involvement of

respectable society with the illegal underworld, the report identified the phenomenon of

organized crime with the specific crime syndicate of the Italian Mafia, depicting “the Mafia as

a coherent and centralized international conspiracy of evil” (Woodiwiss 2012, 15). In line

with the analytical purposes of his work, Stritzel highlights the importance of “knowledge

agents” in shaping the guidelines of the final report. In particular, he sees in Harry J.

Anslinger from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN, predecessor of the current Drug

Enforcement Administration, DEA) the main character that, within the commission,

contributed to construct the threat posed by organized crime to the state and society. To

Anslinger and his FBN is then attributed the introduction of a “strongly Mafia-centered

reading of US organized crime”, that is the idea of a monolithic, wide, and hierarchically-

structured criminal group (Stritzel 2012, 558).

According to Stritzel, other two “knowledge agents” participating to the works of the

Kefauver committee, also played a major role in the restructuring of the conception of

organized crime. Peterson and Sullivan contributed to the final report by providing a further

43

important dimension: on a nationwide basis, criminal organizations were considered to have

established a strong, efficient and far-reaching set of connections between the various local

syndicates. Despite the lack of the necessary data support to endorse a truthful claim about

inter-state criminal associations, they concluded “that nationwide patterns of racketeering

could be identified” (2012, 558). The assimilation of such characteristic will play a major role

in the later construction of transnational organized crime, since it will imply the ability of the

criminal syndicates to successfully cooperate despite distance, police control and national

borders. Indeed, in the Third Interim Report, the commission depicted organized crime as:

A nationwide crime syndicate known as the Mafia characterized by tentacles in

large cities and various international ramifications. These syndicates are held

together by the Mafia as the cement of organized crime and as a secret and

ruthless conspiracy (US Congress 1951, quoted in Stritzel 2012, 559)

Today, many historians argue that the claims made by Peterson and Sullivan highly

overestimated the real cross-border collaboration between Mafia groups and that the vision

suggested by Anslinger and the FBN exaggerated the centralization and organizational

capacity of the criminal associates, dismissing alternative and less sensationalist

configurations of criminal activity (2012, 560).

To be sure, depicting organized crime as a widespread cancer undermining the security and

safety of American society and economy brought the topic to a higher level of attention from

politicians and national agencies. In fact, approaches of commissioners like Peterson, Sullivan

and Anslinger, helped setting the topic of organized crime through the initial steps of

securitization. By securitizing the field of organized crime, this subject was made

permanently present on the federal political agenda, and the agencies involved in the fight and

prevention of criminality had assured their participation in the executive process of the

policies created to repress the phenomenon.

Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover and the Securitization of Organized Crime

The real leap forward in the securitization of organized crime in the USA occurred at the

beginning of the next decade, seeing on the first line popular actors (such as Robert Kennedy)

and J. Edgar Hoover, at the time president of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The

44

proactive Robert Kennedy played a major role in shaping the narration of organized crime as

an “alien conspiracy” lurking underneath America’s good life. During his mandate as

Attorney General, the debate about organized crime assumed the tones of a real crusade

against an enemy that could seriously damage the country unless the state “attack[ed]

organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own” (Kennedy 1960,

253). Robert Kennedy’s book “The Enemy Within” emphatically enriched the American

collective imagination of the criminal world reproducing the idea of an obscure congregation

that weakens the “vitality and strength of the nation” (US Congress 1951). However, despite

being “within”, the enemy Kennedy talks about in his book in no way belongs to the

uncorrupted American society: it rather represents the alien to target as scapegoat for the

bearing of the many dark issues that affect the nation.

A strong endorsement of this understanding of organized crime came, as mentioned above,

from the FBI chaired by J. Edgar Hoover. Interestingly, Stritzel argues that, due to the

growing popularity that the discourse about organized crime was gaining in the American

society and politics, the FBI led by Hoover was compelled to lead the strong coalition of

securitizing actors that was supporting the initiative in order to regain primary visibility

(Stritzel 2012, 559). This argument clearly shows the dynamics that lead political actors to

back and nurture a certain discourse until it achieves the popular and political recognition as a

topic that threatens the state’s security and therefore deserves higher attention and emergency

measures. The increasing importance and mediatization of the securitized issue mirrors a

parallel rising in popularity and political validation of the agencies and actors that take part to

the policies set to eradicate the problem. It is what Stritzel calls socio-political process of

authorization, meaning the struggle among state actors to dominate the knowledge production

with regard to a certain issue. The securitization of organized crime could be therefore read as

a chance for the security elites and the security professionals to “strengthen their position” in

the political decision-process, by establishing elements of fixity in the discourse about

organized crime and the following methods and approaches to fight against it (2012, 560).

Organized Crime and Popular Culture

In shaping the global American discourse on organized crime, the political efforts to securitize

the topic strongly benefited from the media production, in particular the Hollywood

cinematographic industry, which made available for the big public a representation of Mafia

45

criminals tailored on American popular culture. Popular culture embodied, therefore, a

“background of meaning” to which the securitizing actors could constantly refer while

constructing the threat coming from the cruel and ruthless criminal syndicates (2012, 562).

Such political-pop culture nexus represents a powerful example of intertextuality: the two

social dimensions gain and reinforce their meanings through a continuous exchange of

references to each other. An interesting example of the cultural support provided by the media

to politicians is provided by a Time article from the 1950s where Estes Kefauver, leader of the

investigations on organized crime during that decade, was depicted in accordance to two main

features of the US popular culture: the idea of the American hero that fights against the evil to

claim truth and justice, and the notion of sinful city, where darkness and corruption are

opposed to the genuine countryside life of most American citizens (2012, 560). In the

Hollywood industry, the Mafiosi-style gangsters became a solid representation of criminality

creating a whole set of characteristics that would endure in the American popular culture until

more recent times, when the director Francis Ford Coppola essentialized the figure of the

Mafioso in the worldwide famous movie “The Godfather”. By referring to national schemes

of thought and popular symbols, pop culture constituted then a steady background to the

efforts of the politicians and agents that worked to securitize organized crime between the

1950s and the 1960s.

Organized Crime under the Reagan Presidency: Going Global

Despite a great amount of federal money and expertise spent in the fight against organized

crime, in the 1980s criminality in the USA was far from being defeated. The launch of a new

commission to investigate organized crime under the second Reagan’s presidency did not

really question the long-established American understanding of organized crime. Indeed,

Potter and Woodiwiss describe the interpretation resulting from the commission’s work not as

a radical revision of the longstanding idea of criminality in the USA but rather as an

Reporting a proliferation of criminal groups of different ethnic

origins, the commissioners came out with a new “pluralistic” idea of ethnic criminality, which

would entail a double set of consequences: on the one hand, an increase in the perception of

the threat posed by organized crime, now that the Italian Mafia was not alone in the

46

narration on crime where immigrants, and not the American society, were targeted as being

responsible for the fallacies of the system.

The investigation against organized crime promoted by the Reagan’ presidency gained

particular visibility thanks to its close relation with the War on Drugs. Since the first hearings,

drug trafficking came to be “identified as the most profitable organized crime’s activity” and

therefore “the problem that most needed addressing” (President’s Commission on Organized

Crime 1983, quoted in Woodiwiss 2003, 17). Linking organized crime to the fight against

drug trade represented indeed an important maneuver: the high increase of drug consumption

by the American population during the previous decades had made the fight to reduce it a

necessary political move for the current presidency and the following campaign had been

strongly mediatized. Thus, referring to organized crime as the master supplier of substances

that had been slowly decaying generations of American youngsters provided the presidential

commission’s work on criminal organizations with a significant dose of popularity.

The true innovation of the Reagan’s commission final report was resting, however, in the

suggestion of expanding the fight against organized crime at the international level. In a

section of the final document named “Foreign Assistance”, the threat posed by the production

and trafficking of illegal drug was portrayed as a threat that menaced not only the United

States but the “stability” of all “existing democracies” (Narcotics Control Digest 1986, quoted

in Woodiwiss 2003, 18). Acknowledging the intrinsic transnational dimension of the drug

trade, the USA was for the first time suggesting an international cooperation in the fight

against organized crime, promoting “drug related extradition and mutual assistance treaties”

(1986). What grasps particularly the attention of the security study researcher in this Narcotics

Control’s documents is the mentioning of the Department of State and Defense for the first

time in a document dealing with the fight against organized crime. In fact, at that time, the

Department of State and Defense was only invoked to keep an eye on those countries that,

because of their political and economic flaws, could represent a free space for the movement

of drug traffickers and producers. But the commission was nonetheless calling for the

involvement of the state security department to deal with an issue that had been until then of

pure domestic interest.

As Ethan Nadelmann maintains, such document represented an important step towards the

“Americanization of international law enforcement” (Nadelmann 1993, 471). In a book,

whose title Cops across Borders was veritably forerunner of the following decades,

Nadelmann argues that the American hegemony on half of the world countries during the

47

Cold War was also successful in exporting the American way to law enforcement

internationally. Clearly, criminal justice and police methods used in the fight against

order to make the anti-criminal policies effective at home, the USA needed a strong

cooperation with allied countries, and this translated into the spurring of an adaptation of the

foreigner systems to the American one. In his own words, “The United States have provided

the models, and other governments have done the accommodating” (1993, 470).

The direct implication of Nadelmann’s claim is that, together with the methods and techniques

of law enforcement exported from the US, the American narration on organized crime slowly

penetrated the approach to the topic in other countries.

To be sure, there is no intention here to portray the United States as an imperial power that

compels the international community to implement its own criminal justice system and at the

same time disguises himself as the ultimate “world gendarme” that will lead the coalition of

proper democracies in the crusade against organized crime. The purpose was rather to show

that what is undoubtedly the result of American cultural power is the acceptance in most

Western countries of the discourse on criminal organizations as a “pluralist alien conspiracy”.

As it will be discussed in the next chapter, also the approach to the fight of organized crime in

another broad and powerful region such as the European Union, despite the different later

thematization and solution paths to the problem, is deeply rooted in the typically American-

born perception of the topic as external to the system and not rather produced by it.

Organized Crime as the “External Threat”

Adam Edwards and Peter Gill, leading researchers in the field of Critical Criminology, have

categorized this type of discourse on organized crime and transnational organized crime

chapter of a book that represents so far the best account of many critical criminological

perspectives on TOC, the two scholars drew a simple summary of the optional discourses

10The reference is to the book “Transnational Organized Crime: Global Perspectives on Security” (2003), edited by Adam Edwards and Peter Gill, which compounds the critical views on TOC of eighteen scholars that lead the research on the topic. To date, the volume still represents the most complete overview on the critical approaches to transnational organized crime in the field of criminology. Because of its quality and theoretical vicinity with the critical approaches on security, I will rightly draw on many of the chapters included in the volume to develop the project of this dissertation.

48

around the phenomenon, which will all be dealt with in the scope of this chapter. It is essential

to briefly outline the approach of their research in order to provide an understanding of the

vital importance that such theoretical achievements constitute for the security studies research

on transnational organized crime.

To build the three categories of possible narration of TOC, Edwards and Gill utilize the

Foucauldian concept of governmentality. The notion expresses both sides of a same coin: on

the one hand, it means the methods, technology and political instruments that the state

e

it includes the discourse itself that has been produced to shape the issue to control. Depending

on the narration created around TOC as a threat to security, the governmental instruments

utilized to control the criminal phenomenon assume a different response. Thinking about TOC

in terms of governmentality, then, “enables us to think beyond that which already exists in

order to imagine alternative ends and/or means of government” (Edwards and Gill 2003, 267).

Gill and Edwards distinguish three general discourses on TOC: the “External Threat”

discourse, the “Increased Opportunities” discourse and the “Internal Challenge” discourse. As

it will be clear from the next pages, between the first and the second narration there is no real

significant distance. On the contrary, the third narrative presents a very different

understanding of transnational organized crime that, although fairly accepted as common

sense, insignificantly shows in any official discourse.

As mentioned above, this historical section has demonstrated how American politicians and

security agents have thematized organized crime (in the process to become transnational

organized crime) as an “External Threat” and how such discourse was exported to many other

political systems. According to Gill and Edwards, such approach is based on a “criminology

of the other”, where “criminality is assumed to be a consequence of pathological actors who

are essentially different from us, the “normal”, law abiding, consensual majority” (2003, 268-

269). Difference is therefore essentialized, and on this division lies the possibility to blame

the other for his inherent deviance: no mention whatsoever is made about fallacies of the

socio-economic-political system as causes of criminality. Such denial of political and social

responsibility “reaches its apogee in the strategy of securitization” (2003, 269). By

securitizing the issue, politicians can tackle the problem as an existential threat that deserves

the employment of instruments that often escape democratic scrutiny (Shepticky 2003, 43).

49

The two remaining narratives will be treated in further sections of this chapter. Let us then

analyze in the next paragraph the process through which organized crime underwent the

alleged transformation towards transnational organized crime.

The Transnationalization of Organized Crime

“Apparently, crime is now ‘transnational’ – rather than ‘national’ or ‘international’ – and it is ‘organized’, as opposed to ‘random’ or

‘disorganized’. These categories represent an important shift in somebody’s thinking. In accepting them, we are accepting not merely their neat phonetic

arrangement but, much more importantly, the assumptions built into them [;] these terms are a way of looking at the world.”

(Shepticky 2003, 121)

The Post-Cold War and the Official Discourse on TOC

The end of the Cold War undoubtedly had a crucial impact on both the evolution of organized

crime on the global scale and the narrativization of the phenomenon by the politicians in the

international forums. The first half of the 1990s witnessed indeed a growing attention of the

political world towards the harmful activities of the criminal organizations worldwide: the

international gatherings focusing on global organized crime increased exponentially at that

time and the topic started to gain more relevance among scholars and commentators. When

reading many of the documents and reports on the subject from those years, one might very

well have the impression that the criminal organizations just woke up one day after the fall of

the Berlin Wall and decided to go global and become extremely dangerous.

The meta-narrative that began to circulate after 1989 depicted a scenario where the nation-

based criminal syndicates from all over the world could merge into a single and extremely

dangerous network of ruthless criminals acting worldwide, as a consequence of the freer

movement brought by the end of the Cold War. The tones utilized to describe the phenomenon

were getting sensationalist and sometimes dramatic: in 1994, Raine and Cilluffo wrote that

“global organized crime presented a greater international security challenge that anything

Western democracies had to cope with during the Cold War” (Raine and Cilluffo 1994, quoted

in Woodiwiss 2003, 20).

50

Even greater is the palpable danger that permeates from articles such as the one written in

1995 by Roy Godson and William J. Olson. In their words rests in fact the exact mainstream

understanding of transnational organized crime as the adaptation of the American idea of

“pluralist alien conspiracy” to the new globalized world. Agreeing with Raine and Cilluffo,

they depict international organized crime as a radically new typology of threat, because “it is

not ideological, it has nothing to do with right and left but it is money-oriented and greed-

based” and has decided “to take on the lawful institutions and civilized society” (Senator John

Kerry, quoted in Godson and Olson 1995, 19). This quote tackles one of the main features of

the new threat that was being narrated, that is its unconventional nature: no politics was

involved in it, it affected no nation in particular but rather all of them transversally, its

members were not easily identifiable. For Godson and Olson, the real strength of the criminal

syndicates that went global lay in their meticulous organization: refraining the claims made by

Peterson and Sullivan, Godson and Olson highlighted the centralization of the criminal

associations and their close similarity to common legal enterprises.

But what had really changed compared to the past was the ability of criminal organizations to

cross the borders that had been opened up after the defrosting of the Iron Curtain, those

boundaries across which traditional criminal groups of different but recognizable ethnicities

had met to generate a new, multibillionaire illegal commerce. Through this article and many

others, the concept of criminal syndicates became one that was more and more based on

national belonging, reproducing the narration of the “criminal others”: among the most

threatening of the global era were and are the Colombian and Mexican Cartels, the Chinese

Triads, the Russian Mafia and the old but still strong Italian Cosa Nostra.

Olson and Godson’s argument follows the typical pattern of post-1989 discourse on

transnational organized crime. As Letizia Paoli, one of the most well-known critical

criminologists in Europe, argues, such narration stems from a combination of the “pluralist

alien conspiracy” theory and the “illegal enterprise” conception of organized crime. The latter

entails an understanding of crime syndicates as “large-scale bureaucratic organizations” that

“provide consumers with the illegal commodities they demand” (Paoli 2002, 57). The

involvement of the issue of demand of illicit goods implies an important evolution in the

narrative on TOC. The focus is no longer uniquely on the criminals that supply the illegal

markets but also on the conditions that foster and facilitate the proliferation of such trades.

This new perspective introduces, then, the second Edwards and Gill’s paradigm to understand

transnational organized crime, which they have named the “Increased Opportunity” narration

51

(Edwards and Gill 2003, 270). Such discourse is concerned “with those factors that make

certain organized crime events possible”, and therefore includes not only the perspective on

the criminal organizations but also look in the opposite direction, giving value to the external

variables that influence the actions of the actors (2003, 271).

The endorsement of this new paradigm does not exclude, however, the former one of the

“pluralist alien conspiracy” but rather enriches it: those groups alien to the “good” society that

had led their activities within the national boundaries during the half century of Cold War,

benefited from opportunities like the “abolition of border controls” and “the technological and

communication intelligence” to expand their markets and cooperate more closely with

criminal organization from different latitudes (2003, 270).

The following diagram shows briefly the components of the mainstream discourse on

transnational organized crime as produced after 1989.

The Birth of a New Threat

It is paramount in this phase of the analysis to take a look at the concrete events and practices

where such discourse was produced and could be later performed. The 1994 United Nation

World Ministerial Conference on Transnational Organized Crime holds the temporal and

American discourse on TOC

“Alien Conspiracy Theory”

End Cold War, loosening of

border control

“Increased Opportunity

Theory”

Post-Cold War narrative on

TOC

52

importance primacy on the topic. The meeting, held in Naples, Italy, is considered to be the

first major acknowledgement by the international community of the threat represented by

organized crime and it is indeed thanks to such conference that the wording Transnational

Organized Crime acquired the relevance that it commonly has today (Shepticky 2003, 52).

The basic and uncontested rhetoric of the conference is epitomized in the UN Secretary-

General’s address to the conference members. In Boutros Boutros- Ghali’s words:

Organized crime has become a world phenomenon. In Europe, in Asia, in Africa

and in America, the forces of darkness are at work and no society is spared.

[T]raditional crime organizations have, in a very short time, succeeded in adapting

to the new international context to become veritable crime multinationals. Thus,

illegality is gaining inexorably. It is corrupting entire sectors of international

activity (emphasis added) (United Nations 1994b).

Interestingly, organized crime was no longer corresponding uniquely to the traffic of

narcotics, as it had been since the Reagan’s commission work, but rather came to be portrayed

as a phenomenon of much greater proportions, including many other activities that more

directly could attempt to the security of the nation-states. As many commentators claim, it

would be an appealing exercise to assess whether and how much the Washington failure in the

War on Drugs influenced the creation of more comprehensive and alarmist narrative on

organized crime, which could gain momentum in international forums and hence lead to a

The works of the Naples Conference were indeed fruitful in fixing the new transnational

identity of organized crime through a common working definition. Transnational organized

crime could be recognized by the following characteristics:

•

• The hierarchical structure of the groups and the often existence of a personality

•

• The potential to deal with new trades and activities and expand in new cross-border

• Setting cooperation with other transnational groups (Scherrer 2009, 23)

As Shepticky remarks in a famous article about TOC from 2003, the picture that comes out of

this redefinition of transnational organized crime is one that is truly constructed on the idea of

53

an international intrigue of criminal gangsters who plan to “infiltrate legitimate economies

and control territories” (Shepticky 2003, 124). Moreover, as from the previous section of this

chapter, the Naples Conference definition of TOC presents blatant similarities with the

traditional narration on organized crime developed in the United States since the Kefauver

Commission in the 1950s. As Amandine Scherrer argues, the discourse used at the Naples

Conference “made it abundantly clear that the understanding of organized crime that had been

developed in the USA was now shared at the global level” (Scherrer 2009, 23).

The harmful picture envisioned by the new discourse on transnational organized crime

required, according to the participants of the Naples Conference, a fast and efficient

mobilization of resources inside the states’ judicial systems, but it also called for the

strengthening of the cooperation among states to tackle the challenge posed by TOC (United

Nations 1994a). Entire sections of the conference’s report were dedicated to the measures to

be taken in order to coordinate the states’ efforts in terms of regulations about the fight against

money laundering (Section F, par.36), confiscation of illicit assets (par. 38), judicial process of

identification of criminal businesses (par. 37) and so on. Most importantly, the participant

states agreed on the urgency of reinforcing the involvement of regional organizations and

mechanisms, such as the International Criminal Police Organizations and the Council of

Europe among many others, to make effective the member states’ fight against TOC (par. 40).

Therefore, to sum it up in one sentence proffered at the conference by the Italian Prime

Minister of the time Silvio Berlusconi, crime organizations were “armies of evil” that “could

be defeated only by international cooperation” (United Nations 1994c, quoted in Woodiwiss

2003, 21).

After the 1994 Naples conference, the fight against transnational organized crime raised in

importance in the agenda of many international gatherings. In particular, for the G7/G8

countries the issue of transnational organized crime became “one of their main official

concerns” (Scherrer 2009, 8). Despite the manifest attention of the club de riches to drug

trafficking and money laundering already in 1991 (reported at the London meeting), the times

were not mature yet to inscribe these two topics in the broader picture of the threat posed by

international organized crime. However, after the important narrative turn brought by the

Naples Conference, the G7 countries internalized the new global discourse about TOC. The

Seven represented, in fact, the backbone countries sharing the perception of organized crime

that was spreading, as an “octopus”, his dangerous tentacles in the strongest economic

systems of the Western world (Scherrer 2009, 36).

54

The G8 (the inclusion of Russia had meanwhile become a reality) proved his devotion to the

cause of the fight against TOC by instituting a group of expertise on the subject in 1995. The

communiqué from the annual meeting of the Heads of State or Government held in Halifax

announced the formation of a temporary group of Senior Experts on Transnational Organized

Crime, in charge of looking “at existing arrangements for both bilateral and multilateral

cooperation, to identify significant gaps and options for improved cooperation and to propose

practical action to fill such gaps” (2009, 51). The conclusion drawn by the experts’ work were

gathering the member states decided to give permanent mandate to those experts working on

TOC, giving birth to the homonymous Lyon Group. Since then, the Lyon Group has been

quite constantly meeting three times per year, becoming later the Lyon/Rome group.

In a monographic study about the work of the Lyon Group since its creation in 1996,

Amandine Scherrer analyzes in details the documents issued by the experts’ examinations of

the topic of TOC within the G8 activity and her discoveries present indeed an interesting point

of departure to understand the approach that the G8 countries and also many other

international organizations adopt in respect to TOC. First of all, very little space is dedicated

by the experts to the analysis of the threat posed by transnational organized crime as such

(2009, 75). Retrieving the terminology employed by critical scholars, we could say that the

understanding of the phenomenon of transnational organized crime in most official

international milieus does not undergo any kind of problematization

actively promote in this environment a certain set of policies and solutions to the problem,

rather prefer building their research on prepackaged narratives such as the one shaped during

the Naples Conference’s works. Beyond the lack of questioning about the nature of the threat

posed by TOC, the members of the Lyon Group however “take a common approach to the

morphology of the threat and the strategic analysis required to encounter it” (2009, 75),

meaning that, through the lenses of the mainstream discourse on TOC, they are able to issue

recommendations and solutions to the problem. In a nutshell, Scherrer finds once again in the

work of the Lyon Group a major example of reproduction of the American globalized

narrative on transnational organize crime.

After discussing the role of two important international organizations (UN, G8) in the

construction of the TOC threat, it would be nearly obligatory to include the European Union

in our analysis. However, given that the third chapter of this dissertation will provide an

overview of the European securitarian approach to TOC, in order to avoid repetitions, I will

leave to that part the examination of the topic.

55

Is TOC really a New Threat?

The decision to first describe the mainstream approach to transnational organized crime and

the main steps taken in the construction of the official discourse around it was functional to

provide a general idea of how the problem was thematized after the end of the Cold War. The

critical research in both the fields of criminology and security studies has questioned the

tenets of such political rhetoric, offering a thorough deconstruction of the concept of TOC

portrayed as a new menace to security emerged in the post-1989 world. In the following

pages, a review of the critical contributions that have engaged in the problematization of the

international discourse on TOC will be presented, in the attempt to reveal the political origins

of the narrativization of the phenomenon as a new threat.

On the criminological side, an excellent insight in the critical understanding of transnational

great deal of analytical attention to the transformation of the discourse on TOC between the

end of the Cold War and the beginning of the global era, Paoli suggests three possible

explanations for the drastic increase in the political concern for the new threat posed by TOC.

According to Paoli, transnational organized crime could be:

A new label to name the already existing phenomenon of international illegal activities

A new phenomenon, which is the spreading of new illegal activities and new ways of

A political expedient utilized “to promote and legitimize encompassing policy and institutional reform and enhance international police and judicial cooperation” (Paoli 2008, 2)

Clearly, the first and the third options are not in contradiction and could rather be considered

as consequential. On the contrary, the second possible explanation draws a neat line of

distance in relation to the other two. The conclusion Paoli reaches does not exclude any of the

three alternatives. It does however prioritize the first and the third ones over the second

option. According to the Italian scholar, it is undeniable that the conditions for the

proliferation of illicit trade have increased after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many new markets

have been opened, especially in countries that have been freed by the Soviet yoke or that more

in general have taken part of the globalization process that involves the whole globe. Indeed

here Paoli draws an important distinction between countries that are able to enforce their

criminal law and therefore limit the spreading of illegal commerce and, on the other side,

56

weaker states, often of recent birth, which do not hold a strong control on their institutions

and their societies and thus represent sitting ducks for criminal organizations.

However, Paoli argues, even though the social, technological and economic changes brought

by globalization have enabled the opening of new illegal markets, the nature of the criminal

organizations supplying them has not really changed. In fact, the transnationality that has been

attributed to the contemporary illegal activities is truly transnational only in the technologies

and communications they take advantage of to manage their business (Paoli 2008, 53). As

Dick Hobbs has claimed, the real field of execution of the illicit activities promoted by

Paoli 2008, 53). It is indeed what Hobbs calls “glocal”, meaning that rather than being

effectively transnational, organized crime is, to use an expression dear to the promoters of

glocality, “local at all points”. However, despite the spreading existence of criminal activities

around the world, both Hobbs and Paoli argue against the understanding of organized crime as

commonly envisioned by the “alien conspiracy” metanarrative, which pictures an important

merge of national gangs into a powerful and conspirator system that voluntarily aims at

attacking the well-functioning states’ institutions. Despite the great discourse constructed

around the idea of structured and centralized criminal syndicates, the Mafia-like organization

is not the normality among criminal gangs but rather a very specific and limited example of

them (Paoli 2008, 51).

Indeed, according to Paoli, the unrealistic connotation of the official discourse on TOC is

demonstrated by an important paradox: although promoting the above mentioned conspirator

image of transnational organized crime, the later working definitions of TOC adopted by the

international community totally mismatch with the political and mediatized narrative (2008,

41). A fitting example is provided by the definition included in the United Nations

Convention against Transnational Organized Crime from 2000, where the agreement of all

states was found on a “lowest common denominator definition” that obviously remains too

broad and vague. Article 2, paragraph (a), of the Convention states:

Organized Criminal Group shall mean a structured group of three or more persons,

existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or

Unfortunately, it is not in the scope of this dissertation to analyze in detail the involvement of organized crime of the project is to deconstruct and understand the security discourse on transnational organized crime, I would rather follow the path taken until now and look more directly at the narration of TOC as produced by the international (and mostly Western) political organizations.

57

more serious crimes or offences established in accordance with this convention, in order

to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit (United Nations

General Assembly 2000, 25)

From the first line it is possible to appreciate the distance between such definition and the

“pluralist alien conspiracy” discourse: to be sure, no Mafia-like organization could ever

properly work with three or even four people. This major inconsistency leads Letizia Paoli to

conclude that TOC does not represent a new phenomenon but rather a new label to call an old

set of activities that only recently have gained international popularity and have been used as

expedients by politicians and international agents to support tighter cooperation and policy

reforms (Paoli 2008, 54).

At this point, the work of the criminologist gives the way to a more attentive analysis of the

security dimension of the threat caused by TOC. The following paragraph will therefore

provide an account of the critical contributions in the field of security studies, mainly drawing

on the work of the Paris School. These examinations will allow us to gain an overview of the

way the securitization of transnational organized crime has taken part of the larger revision of

the international official understanding of security in the post-Cold War and, in particular,

after the great events of September 2001.

TOC after September 11 and the Paris School

During the last decade and in particular after the watershed represented by the 9/11 terrorist

attacks, the transnational dimension of organized crime has grasped the attention of the Paris

this paragraph, the theoretical conclusions they have reached are consistent with those

envisioned by Paoli and other critical criminologists, who read TOC as a politically

constructed threat.

Most of the research on transnational organized crime and terrorism pursued by the Paris

School focuses on the perception of (in)security diffused after the Al-Qaeda attacks to the

Western world. According to the Parisians, 9/11 represents a fundamental moment in world

politics since it spurred a strengthening of the international securitarian rhetoric based on the

new global dynamics that had been developing since the end of the Cold War. To be sure, the

analysis of Bigo and the other researchers addresses 9/11 not as the watershed event

generating a reality change in the state and international security. It rather embodies the

58

disclosure of possibilities for politicians and international agents to shape a new, more

profitable discourse on “global security” that could raise general consent for a closer

international cooperation among states and a deeper surveillance on their citizens.

Bigo’s main argument is that 2001 has provided the final big thrust to all the post-1989

political claims on the transnationality of new threats, among which transnational organized

crime stands as one of the leading causes of

Balzacq et al. 2010). On the shock that the Western world was experiencing after the Al-

Qaeda attacks, it was not difficult for politicians and international bureaucrats to tailor a

discourse set on the chaotic, dangerous global disorder. In front of such growing insecurity,

the states that had been hit right at their heart invoked a strong alliance to fight against the

evil. It is not by coincidence that the states targeted as dangerous for the international

community, such as Somalia and Afghanistan, were given the appellation of “rogue states”,

witnessing the impact of speech and political language on the construction of a steady new

narrative, so that a “common sense rhetoric emerged using the semantics of international

disorder, failed states and the need for a more global security” (emphasis added) (Bigo 2006,

387).

The most significant change engendered by the political discourse on global security

following 9/11 concerned indeed the nature of the new threats: the new enemy of the West

was no longer identifiable with one specific country and his main preoccupation was not with

and not easy to recognize as in the traditional inter-state rivalry.

Because of its purported transnational dimension, organized crime started to play a primary

role in the narrative on global security developed in the aftermath of 9/11: the new discourse

was indeed structured on the dichotomy of the two realms of free and ethical democracies on

the one side, and the evil army of brand-new non-state actors on the other. Transnational

organized crime, with its features of sturdy, cross-border networks as depicted and diffused by

the longstanding American narration of the phenomenon, represented indeed a precious

opportunity for the Western politicians to construct a threat, which could “justify”, through

the claim of “the advent of transnational political violence” “the violation of basic human

rights and the expansion of surveillance” on the Western countries’ population (Bigo 2008,

13).

The commitment of the USA and its allies in fostering the “global security threat” discourse

on TOC clearly benefited by the general posture the West took on after the attacks. The “War

59

against Terror” that after September 11 was declared by the Western democracies presupposed

indeed a robust and extremely dangerous connection between the Islamic terrorist groups and

the criminal syndicates operating on the global (underworld) stage, with transnational

organized crime seen as the wholesale distributor of goods to terrorist syndicates. To be sure,

the conceptual linkage between TOC and the Western arch-enemy, terrorism, entailed an

important deepening in the political and public attention paid to transnational criminality.

American think thanks, such as the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center of the

American University, inflamed the discourse by portraying TOC not only as a phenomenon

related to terrorism but as the true permissive condition for terrorism to survive and menace

the democratic countries (Shelley and Picarelli 2002, 311).

Such truth claim became, according to Bigo, “doxa of large parts of the Western security

professions and of the majority of politicians” (Bigo 2006, 387). The reproduction of the

securitarian discourse on TOC at the highest levels of politics had indeed a strong impact on

security perception of Western societies. Claiming that the dangerous members of the criminal

groups could freely “walk among us” without being easily identified, necessarily generated a

common feeling of insecurity and uneasiness (Bigo 2008, 15).

Paradoxically then, the political discourse that makes of the provision of global security and

defense from the new criminal transnational threat its key points, ends up generating greater

insecurity among society. The level of anxiety and fear rises until one has the feeling of being

continuously “on the brink of a disaster” and therefore needs invoking “the urgency to do

something to counter it” (2006, 390). Indeed, the core concept of the speculation around the

Paris’ research is that the securitization of the transnational threat such as TOC engenders an

equal in proportion, widespread form of insecuritization of society. According to Bigo, the

prevalent feeling of continuous uneasiness stems from the very idea of global and

transnational dimension of the new threat that can have an effective impact on everyone,

because it rests on a narration that foresees “the rise of an interconnected global insecurity at

all levels where local events would in fact be the result of this local development” (Bigo

2007, 388). Bigo’s argument proves to be not far from Hobb’s understanding of the

transnationality of organized crime: a meticulous exercise of deconstruction reveals that such

feature emerges as the result of a well-organized political discourse, which aims at driving the

public attention on the danger caused by TOC, therefore allowing for the securitization of the

issue and the consequential measures taken to fight against it.

60

As already discussed in the section dedicated to the Paris School in the first chapter, the

concept of (in)securitization theorized by Bigo and his associates looks at the political

practices that reproduce and strengthen the securitizing narrative, rather than at the mere

speech acts that construct the threats as maintained by the Copenhagen School. The inclusion

of both discursive and non-discursive practices in the Paris School’s analysis shifts the

attention from a purely conceptual idea of security to one that is more empirical and

sociologically-based. More importantly, it discloses the useful ambivalence of the work of

security agencies, where social interactions are at the same time rule-governed and rule-

governing, meaning that they stem from a political imperative that shapes social conducts but

they also maintain, perform and reproduce that narrative on which they are created. Practices

are in fact “a routinised type of behavior which consists of several elements, interconnected to

one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things” and their use,

background knowledge in the form of understanding and know-how, states of emotion and

motivational knowledge” (emphasis in the original) (Reckwitz 2002, quoted in Balzacq et al.

2010, 3). Understanding (in)securitization through sociological lenses brings the benefit of

considering the intersubjectivity of this concept and the way the field of the security practices

can be crossed and influenced by practices typical of other fields of interaction.

For the geographic-analytical framework is no longer that of the nation-state but the new

purported globalized world, the attention is focused on the actors that have gained importance

since the national elites have assigned them the task to fight against the transnational threat

embodied by organized crime. Moving on a parallel line with Paoli’s conclusion, Bigo

recognizes the instrumental nature of the narratives that claim dangerous conjunctures among

transnational non-state actors, which come to be utilized by politicians and field agents as

expedient to support the granting of greater powers and stronger cooperation among political

elites at the international level. The tighter collaboration of decision makers and agents is

the world a safer place, intelligence services, bureaucrats and international organizations

pledge for their need to access larger and more detailed databases and information that can

only be gained through data exchanges and a higher level of use of surveillance technologies

on the population.

The international crusade against transnational organized crime represents indeed one of the

most interesting examples of transnational threat spurring a major change in the nature of the

security agencies and in their way of pursuing the fight against the phenomenon. Indeed, the

61

speculation of the researchers of the Paris School has intensively focused on the nature of the

new agencies’ networks set by the Western countries to combat TOC.

The alleged transnationality of this threat clearly required a response playing at the same

categories of external defense and

internal security have undergone a major change: the division lines between the two concepts

that had strongly characterized the role of security in modernity become blurred and hard to

locate in the new global security p

rendered “obsolete the conventional distinction between the two realms of war, defense,

international order and strategy on the one hand and crime, internal security, public order and

police investigations on the other” (Bigo 2006, 389).

The two agencies that along modern history have represented the two opposite fields, the

national army and police, are now faced with a major revolution in their assignments.

Compared with the clear-cut roles of the past, when the army was mainly charged of waging

war outside and the police of keeping order and repress crime inside, today their tasks are

more and more intertwined and hard to differentiate. Bigo speaks indeed of a process of true

“de-

Bigo offers the powerful image of security agents acting as if they were walking along a

Möbius Ribbon, a geometrical spatial concept where the strip is tied to form a loop that by

definition is non-orientable and whose surface is one-sided in a way that walking on it

involves a continuous and indefinable inside and outside of the subjects.

The topographic shift in the action of the security agencies is obviously symptomatic of a

progressive erosion of the political modern notion of sovereignty, imagined as the coincidence

of the power exercised within national boundaries and the population living in that delimited

territory. It is what J. Shepticky has dared to call “post-modern policing” (Shepticky 1998,

488). It is post-modern since today police’s main task is no longer to patrol alleys and jail

national criminals but rather to share information with other states’ police in order to bring

together the necessary expertise to chase and -hopefully- catch threatening transnational

criminals. From being the highest expression of state sovereignty’s power of control on the

national population, police has become the tool at the service of a broader international

political elite committed to free the globe from those groups that purportedly make the world

more unsafe every day.

62

The post-modern policing Shepticky has theorized becomes particularly visible when one

analyzes the measures put in place by the Western governments to structure the fight against

TOC. At the turn of the century, “information-sharing weaknesses” were considered as a

“major contributing factor” for the increase of insecurity in the Western hemisphere (Davis et

al. 2010, 48). According to Shepticky, the new form of international control, which indeed

compounds the work of the army and that of police, was embodied by international

intelligence-led law-enforcement agencies, such as Interpol, Europol and many national

security agencies involved in the new, global fight against transnational criminality. This

intelligence-led policing “focused on the identification, analysis and management of criminal

threats”, and introduced the innovative practice of delivering “risk-based and proactive”

reports (Shepticky 2003a, 46). Being highly dependent on all kind of information, these

agencies built a “surveillance assemblage”, which included a wide range of techniques of

surveillance, such as “database matching, participating informants, CCTV surveillance” and

much more (2003a, 46).

Central in this reconceptualization of post-modern global policing was therefore the growing

exchange of information among countries and international agencies, perceived as the only

effective way to individuate and catch cross-border criminal organizations. Evidently, the

construction of a security narrative based on transnational threats had engendered a parallel

transnationalization of the instruments used to chase the danger. The result is therefore a

major change in the way of understanding security in relation to political territoriality and

sovereignty. In this regard, Balzacq et al. offer a beautiful contribution:

The effects of power and resistance are thus no longer contained by the political matrix of

the relation between state and society. They exceed the frame of representations inscribed

within the nation state, and disconnect direct relations between state and individuals

inside and between the external of the nation state in its relation with other states, as a

different universe (Balzacq et al. 2010, 8).

Maintaining that state boundaries cannot reflect the topology of the traditional security field

anymore leads necessarily to engage in an effort to reterritorialize the security discourse and

practices (Balzacq et al. 2010, 5). Discarding the old notion of foe presented as an outside

entity threatening domestic values and society, the identity of what today undermines global

security needs to be rethought along the lines of the transnational dimension. Instead of an

inside/outside friend-enemy relation, the contemporary securitarian control sets its basis on

division lines that are transversal to different states and that shape the discourse on security

threats on the targeting of specific categories, such as, for example, groups of individuals

63

recognizable for particular criminal affiliation, religious connection, poverty, minority origins,

gender and race. On these groups is concentrated all the “expert knowledge” and “hyper-

specialization” of the transnational security agencies, which have transmitted such particular

way of conceptualizing the provenance of threats first to governments and then to societies. It

has created, in other words, “an abnormalization of parts of society by creating lines of

division and exclusion inside each society along distinct but overlapping criteria” (2010, 6).

Bigo creates a powerful image to signify such new way of thinking the categories of security,

which he calls the “ban-opticon”. The expression is based on the Foucauldian concept of pan-

opticon, representing the tight surveillance of the entire population, but borrows the notion of

“ban” from the philosophical speculation of Giorgio Agamben, who uses it as a

discriminatory principle that divides the population in welcomed segments and excluded,

rejected categories. Opposed to the permanent and oppressive control of the totality as

described by the pan-opticon, the ban-opticon establishes a system of surveillance strongly

focused on just certain classes of individuals. What truly characterizes the ban-opticon is the

“exceptionalism of power” that double displays by excluding the unwelcomed groupings “in

the name of their future potential behavior” and by normalizing the remaining population

“through its production of normative imperatives” (2010, 7).

Bigo and the other IPS researchers share the conviction that among these imperatives

performed through the process of normalization, the most important is embodied by free

movement. Particularly relevant for an analysis based on the European Union (which will

then be examined more in detail in the next chapter), the impulse to the free movement of

people, goods and technologies represents the pendant of the security practices paying

obsessive attention to the actions of individuals belonging to the banned categories. This

feature of the IPS speculation offers an interesting insight about the causes of certain sets of

security practices, but being the European Union the best example for the topic, the question

will be dealt with more thoroughly in the next chapter.

New Perspectives on Transnational Organized Crime

The previous pages have shown the constructed nature of the very concept of organized

crime, its journey from the United States’ domestic politics to the international fora, followed

64

by the introduction of the notion within other world democracies and the alleged

transformation to transnational organized crime after the end of the Cold War and especially

after September 11, 2001. The many voices whose contributions have been compounded

earlier in this chapter claim unanimously the existence of a powerful metanarrative around the

phenomenon of (transnational) organized crime that has led in the last half century to a

growing (in)securitization of the topic.

As explained in the first chapter, a securitizing move enacted by politicians and practitioners

of the field of security involves a specific set of consequences, among which the most

important for our analysis is the crystallization of the securitized discourse as a truth-claim

and therefore the inability to problematize the very roots of such rhetoric. However, having

engaged in a deep exercise of deconstruction of the concept of transnational organized crime,

we have now the opportunity to distance ourselves from the mainstream understandings of

transnational organized crime and rather rethink the phenomenon on constructive critical

basis. To be sure, deconstructing transnational organized crime as a threat to global security

does not mean dismissing the threat posed by TOC, but rather revising the understanding of

security that better fits a new framework of analysis of the topic.

To begin our critical rethinking of transnational organized crime it might be useful to go back

to the three discourse options proposed by Peter Gill and Adam Edwards. The first two

narratives -the “External Threat” and the “Increased Opportunity Theory”- have been

exhaustively analyzed and accepted as the narrations underpinning the past and contemporary

discourse on transnational organized crime. Contrarily, the third discourse brings about a total

overhaul of the classic paradigm, developing a critical interpretation of organized crime. The

so-called “Internal Challenge” discourse departs from the perception of criminality

social orders” and originating from specific flaws in the system (Edwards and Gill 2003, 272).

The longstanding dichotomy portraying the healthy and well-functioning (mostly) Western

world as challenged by the filthy, corrupted underworld populated by criminals of all kinds

12At this point, a note deserves attention: the following pages will provide an account of an alternative, critical, view of looking at transnational organized crime. The contributions proposed do not necessarily come from the field of the Critical Studies on Security (CSS) but mostly draw on Critical Criminology, simply because the CSS have not contributed in any way to offer a critical understanding of TOC that, after the deconstructive examination, could generate an innovative conceptual framework involving a radical shift in the notion of security utilized. Nonetheless, in no way the use of literature from other scholarly domains will change the securitarian angle of the dissertation; rather, it will hopefully offer new ideas for further investigations on TOC from a Critical Studies on Security perspective.

65

falls apart under such critical scrutiny. Blurring the lines between the two spheres causes a

redefinition of the relations between licit and illicit activities, in a way that allows imagining

also grey interstices in between, instead of a neat black/white division.

Abandoning the possibility to blame a specific target of individuals involved in criminal

activities leads to the nodal point of the critical understanding of crime: the tendency to

establish criminal activities and develop them on entrepreneurial basis can be seen as

generated by systemic fault lines that allow and incentivize criminal behaviors (2003, 274).

The core of the problem does not rest, therefore, in the need to find efficient ways to enforce

the existing law on deviant conducts in societies but in the problematization of the very roots

of such comportments. The focus of the analysis rapidly shifts, hence, from the domain of

repression and fight against criminality to the social milieu as the original location of all

criminal behaviors.

When approaching organized crime from the angle of socialization, we are allowed to

imagine a comprehensive revision of the mechanisms utilized to bring durable solutions to the

problem. To use Edwards and Gill’s theoretical suggestion to read TOC as a governmentality

issue as mentioned earlier in the chapter, the change of narrativization of the problem

revolutions the policies envisioned to deal efficiently with the topic.

To clearly express the previous utterance, it is undoubtedly fascinating and useful to explain it

through a quotation:

crime which worries citizens most –violent street crime- are, for the most part, the

products of poverty, unemployment, broken homes, rotten education, drug addiction and

alcoholism, and other social and economic ills about which the police can do little, if

anything. Rather than speaking up, most of us stand silent and let politicians get away

with law and order rhetoric the mistaken notion that the police- in even greater numbers

and with even more gadgetry- can alone control crime (emphasis added) (Di Grazia 1976,

quoted in Reiner 2012, 135).

Narrativizing crime as a social production “presupposes intervention against the social

preconditions for the formation and reproduction of criminal associations” and therefore

prioritizes social policy interventions over the official law enforcement discourse on crime

and control (Edwards and Gill 2003, 275).

66

If we decide to wear the lenses that make us read the criminal textuality as a consequence of

systemic flaws, it is then necessary to reveal what is the social order that critical

criminologists generally blame as the permissive cause for criminality. The members of this

criminological branch are fairly unanimous in pointing at the market society and its further

latest evolutions as the systemic environment thrusting behaviors that relate to organized

crime. First of all, the importance of globalization deserves to be fully acknowledged when

discussing about organized crime. Globalization as the latest, and most extreme, phase of the

capitalist market economy has had an enormous impact on the evolution of organized crime.

Indeed, without globalizing forces there would have probably not been any transnationality of

“increased opportunities” variable. But the very originality of globalization rests in the

intimate intertwining of global and local dimensions, which mirrors the different and

Having the transnationality of organized crime been discussed in the previous paragraphs, we

can focus now on the local dimension of the phenomenon. Indeed, in order to talk about the

social origins of crime, the concept of TOC needs to be brought back from the higher level to

a much smaller environment. This does not erase of course the importance of transnational

criminal activities, but rather, as Dick Hobbs has argued, downsizes it in order to provide a

more realistic overview of the topic. Organized crime is in fact, before being transnational, a

local phenomenon and “it is at the local level that organized crime manifests itself as a

tangible process of activity” (Hobbs 1998, 408).

Voicing the core belief of most critical criminologists, Robert Reiner affirms “No Justice, No

Peace” (Reiner 2012, 147). The justice Reiner talks about is closely linked to John Rawls’

idea of justice as fairness, which compounds the two principles of liberty and equality. In a

nutshell, every human being should be endowed with the freedom and the opportunity to

pursue the best optional life he wishes. Clearly, such egalitarian image of society does not

even remotely mirror the market society we live in, especially after the neoliberal turn taken

in the end of the 1970s that has led to a dramatic increase of social inequality (2012, 138).

The poverty pockets generated by such political and economic moves have created a fertile

location for the proliferation of crime. “The selectivity and unevenness of globalization” have

further pushed the increasing uneasiness and dire conditions of specific categories of societies

to which national and international institutions have responded not by attempting to level the

inequalities but rather criminalizing the inferior conditions (Edwards and Gill 2003, 274). The

67

narrative of “Law and Order”- naturally related to the “Alien Conspiracy theory” of

transnational organized crime- nurtured the tendency to prioritize law enforcement over a

more ultimate and durable social solution. Reiner envisions, therefore, a restructuring of the

broad narration about organized criminality in the direction of a renewed “social-democratic

criminology” (Reiner 2012, 139). It would engender a new discourse on “crime control” as

“primarily function of social, economic and cultural processes” that would lead policies in the

fight against organized crime towards a more circumscribed geographical dimension by

dealing with the problem at his very roots, rather than creating an international law-

enforcement system of gigantic proportions.

By retrieving the very concept of social democracy, Reiner indirectly introduces the concept

of security entailed by his criminological understanding of organized crime. Placing himself

in the wide post-Marxist tradition, he pictures security as an attribute of individuals,

achievable thanks to the concept of “emancipation”. As from the first chapter, the closest

branch of the Critical Studies on Security to such kind of security notion is undoubtedly the

Welsh School represented by Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones. Tackling the issue of

transnational organized crime from an emancipator perspective could open a new space for

researching TOC from a securitarian angle that not only deconstructs the official meta-

narratives but also imagines a new way to reform the policies oriented at fighting against the

problem.

68

Chapter 3. Transnational Organized Crime in the European Union: a Case Study

Introduction

Because of its unique political shape and thanks to a quite broad literature on the topic, the

European Union (EU) represents a fruitful case study for the application of the theoretical

framework discussed in the previous chapters. Indeed, most of the scholars, whose works on

transnational organized crime have been compounded in the second chapter, bear in mind the

European Union as one of the political regions that mostly has contributed to develop the

securitarian discourse on TOC during the last three decades. It is also in European research

institutes that the critical understandings of security, in this case applied to organized crime,

have generated the most innovative and original explorations on the topic, such as the

achievements of the Paris School.

The institutional evolution that the EU has undergone and still experiences today provides a

major example of the development of the narratives on organized crime and their growing

entanglement with the field of security. The continuous restructuring and adjustments of the

founding treaties and of the several domains and competences of the European Union offer a

step-by-step evolution of the political way of dealing with the subject of TOC, how it came to

be perceived as an existential threat to the well-being of the European citizens and, above all,

how it became intimately intertwined with the notions of security and freedom within the

open borders of the EU.

Therefore, this chapter will set the analysis on a temporal basis that will mainly concentrate

on the European Union’s approach to (transnational) organized crime starting from the

stipulation of the Schengen Agreement in 1985 until today. All later narrativizations of

organized crime in the continent owe a great deal of theoretical background to the creation of

the internal borderless space achieved after the opening of the Single Market with all the

revolutionary measures brought by it. A major allegation of all critical security theorists

concerns indeed the redefinition of the relation between freedom and security after the total

disclosure of the borders to the free movement of people, goods and capitals, and the

69

changing nature of the notion of border as envisioned by the European treaties and by the

professionals of the security sector. Being the discourse on TOC fully embedded in such

framework, the European liberty-security trade-off will be discussed in the next pages.

The mentioned analysis will however follow a detailed scrutiny of the evolutions of the fight

against TOC in the framework of the great changes witnessed by the European institutions

after the signature of the Maastricht Treaty from 1992 and most importantly, the 1997

Amsterdam Treaty. The creation and the subsequent redefinition of the Third Pillar of the

European Union establishing the intergovernmental field of Justice and Home Affairs

represented the assertive European will to strengthen the member states’ Police and Judicial

Co-operation in Criminal Matters. Indeed, the growing attention of the Community to topics

that had been traditionally dealt with by the single states as domestic issues, such as

immigration, crime and terrorism, slowly led to the securitization of these subjects, clearly

restructuring the whole notion of European security. It helped to establish what Bigo has

named the “security continuum” (Bigo 2006).

An important focus of this chapter will be the rise of European security agencies as first-line

actors of the security domain, in particular Europol. Being closely related to the changing

nature of the security discourse on transnational organized crime, Europol will deserve

particular analytical attention in order to demonstrate the applicability of the Paris School’s

assumptions about the agents’ security practices and their impact on the security narratives.

Understanding Europol’s routine will allow us to have an overview of the current methods

employed by the security agencies in the fight against organized crime, and starting from

them, we will be enabled to examine the way security practices perform and reiterate the

official discourse on TOC as widely discussed in the previous chapter. In particular, the most

recent research on surveillance practices in the field of security will find space at the end of

this chapter as the latest instruments utilized by practitioners in the fight against transnational

organized crime.

70

Organized Crime in the Framework of the Area of Justice and Home Affairs

The Pre-Schengen Era

Before the Maastricht Treaty institutionalized in 1992 the intergovernmental area of Justice

and Home Affairs within the framework of the so-called Third Pillar, the European

Community did not comprise a real stable collaboration among the Member States on the

topics of criminal justice and police cooperation. To be sure, organized crime fell under this

policy umbrella and it was therefore for long time dismissed from any European-wide

political discussion.

Until the big steps taken by the old and new Member States since the mid-1980s, when the

European countries agreed on many revolutionary changes like the formation of the Single

Market and the total overhaul of the European Community institutional structure, the judicial

and police issues were still regarded as integrally domestic matters that did not belong to the

policy sectors where the EC could demonstrate her competences. However, starting from the

1970s, the need for an extension of communitarian cooperation towards the domain of police

and criminal justice was becoming more compelling, due to the growing terrorist attacks

experienced by some Member States (Council of the European Union 2005). In particular, the

tension created by the recurrent attacks of the Italian “Red Brigades” and the German “Red

Army Fractions” and the culmination of the terrorist threat with the 1972 attacks at the

Munich Olympic Games, pushed the Member States to create a forum of loose

intergovernmental collaboration in the field of domestic security. At the Rome European

Council on 1st December 1975, the presidents and prime ministers of the adhering countries

gave birth to the Trevi Group, whose first meeting took place in June 1976 (2005, 8).

Trevi represented an ad hoc cooperation platform “where European Economic Community

Member States cooperated, exchanged information and discussed best practices in the area of

terrorism, organized crime, immigration and Home Affairs in general without having to go

through the framework of the Community” (Carrapico 2010, 44). The structure of the Trevi

group would be best identified as a network of cooperative working groups focused on

different but closely related topics. By the end of its existence in 1993, Trevi could count on

five working groups dealing respectively with terrorism (Working Group 1), police training,

71

public order and hooliganism (Working Group 2), organized crime and drug trafficking

(Working Group 3), nuclear safety and security (Working Group 4), emergencies management

(Working Group 5) (Bunyan 1993, 1). As Den Boer and many others have emphasized, the

common feature of all the Trevi working groups was the veil of secrecy and undemocratic

decision-

unaccountability before the national and European parliaments and the merely advisory nature

of their analysis, the suggestions issued by the experts working on the topics of the Trevi’s

competences exerted a quite “impressive influence over national strategies and policy trends”

on the subjects (Carrapico 2010, 44).

Of particular interest for this dissertation is the Trevi’s Working Group 3 (WG 3), established

in 1985 and assigned with the job of monitoring organized crime in the specific relation to

drug trafficking. As in the USA's approach to the fight against organized crime mentioned in

the second chapter, the attention towards international drug trafficking as the major concern

related to criminal organizations represented at that time, and mostly thanks to the

internationalization of the Reagan’s powerful relative campaign, a common official discourse

among the experts dealing with the topic.

Therefore, the works of the Trevi group fully followed the mainstream narration of organized

crime as shaped in the United States. However, being part of an institutional total

restructuring that would years later lead to the building of the European Union, Trevi also

produced a more specifically continental initial understanding of organized crime. Tony

Bunyan reports in detail the work and the achievements of the Working Group 3, and from his

analysis it is possible to notice the initial blurring between the two topics of terrorism and

organized crime. Indeed, despite the strong focus of the WG 3 on drug-related trade and

international crime, the working definitions included in their reports presented organized

crime and terrorism as tightly connected phenomena in the same broader security narration

(Bunyan 1993, 3).

The job of the Trevi group produced important theoretical and practical aspects that will later

be foundational of the Justice and Home Affairs Pillar created by the Maastricht Treaty.

Above all, despite its sporadic meetings, the Trevi group was functional in setting the basis

for the generation of the “security continuum” envisioned by Didier Bigo as the continuous

“spillover of meanings between terrorism, organized crime and immigration” allowing for

“the transposition of threat meaning from one concept to another”, and therefore leading to

72

The Schengen Agreement and the Maastricht Treaty

On 14 June 1985, Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium signed the

first, symbolic Schengen Agreement. Coming into force at the beginning of the following

year, the agreement marked a truly new era for the European countries. The five initial

subscribers, followed few years later by Italy (1990), Spain and Portugal (1991), Greece

(1992), Austria (1995), Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland, the last two

despite their missing title as Member States of the European Union (1996), signed in 1990 the

Convention for the implementation of the Schengen Agreement (Council of the European

Union 2005, 9). At the beginning of 1995, the Schengen area became a reality for Germany,

Benelux, France, Spain and Portugal, letting the other states –and many more in the next

decade- join the ranks a few at a time.

The Schengen Agreement laid down the tenets for the abolition of all internal borders’ checks

among the signatories states. Citizens from those countries were finally able to cross the

national boundaries without need to bother about long passport controls and police officers

patrolling the frontier posts. All obstacles to free traffic flow at the internal borders had to be

totally removed, as sanctioned by the Schengen Border Code (2006).

The gradual opening of internal borders among signatory states does not represent the whole

provision of the Schengen Agreement. The very important corollary of this fundamental

political step in the integration of the European continent entailed two sets of major

consequences: the strengthening of the police and justice cooperation of the Member States as

a counterpart for the growing freedom of movement brought by the Schengen Agreement, and

the “more effective surveillance” of the external borders and the increasing tendency to

exclude third-countries’ citizens (European Commission 2008). Those features represent the

eminent reverse of the free movement coin and both two issues deserve a deep examination,

which will be provided in the second, more theoretical section of this chapter.

The urgency perceived by the European politicians for a closer cooperation in police and

justice affairs as a proportional pendant to the opening of the internal borders, can be

recognized through the growing pro-activity of the Trevi Group. In 1989 the Trevi

Coordinators’ Group presented to the European Council held in Madrid the “Palma

Document”, an initial draft of the necessary changes and measures to be taken at the European

level in the domain of criminal justice and police cooperation to compensate the loosening of

The Palma Document was acclaimed by the Council and it was accepted as a starting point for

73

further investigations on the topic of reforms of such political field. It led in fact to the

development of a detailed “Program of Action” in the area of Justice and Home Affairs that

will be introduced few years later in the Maastricht Treaty as the Third Pillar composing the

newly born European Union.

Together with the “Declaration of Trevi Ministers” agreed in December 1989, the Program of

Action and the Palma Document (that was later integrated and presented at the Edinburgh

European Council in December 1992) represent the three foundational reports for the

construction of the Justice and Home Affairs domain institutionalized by the Maastricht

Treaty. All three documents share the “often repetitive” claim for new requirements in terms

of European-wide “policies on terrorism, policing, drug trafficking, and immigration controls”

(Bunyan 1993, 4). The wide-spread fear that criminal and illegal activities could suffer from

an exponential increase as a consequence of the opening of internal borders, pushed the

experts of the field to suggest a broad set of new instruments to solve the unfortunate

outcome. Specifically, the Program of Action developed the project of the European

Information System (EIS) and the European Drugs Intelligence Unit (EDIU) as first

experiments of surveillance security practices within the EU (Bunyan 1993, 4).

The signing of the Maastricht Agreement in 1992 marked a cardinal moment in the

development of the European Union and, in the scope of this dissertation, of the

intergovernmental field of Justice and Home Affairs (JHA). The European Union was

structured around three pillars: the first pillar comprising the European Communities and all

the economic and social agreements signed until then. The second pillar was concerned with

Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), while the third pillar included all Police and

Judicial Co-operation in Criminal Matters (PJCC). The first pillar was the only one of the

three to be managed with supranational methods. The second and the third pillars, on the

contrary, were kept under the intergovernmental method, the same that the political topics

there included had enjoyed during the past decades. (Hix and Hoyland 2011, 53).

One first important remark can be made about the above mentioned pillar division: the

progressive abolition of borders between EU Member States led to the formation of a second

field of security, that-is-to-say the internal security born from the opening of the frontiers.

However, the EU official security narrative will always promote a clear-cut artificial division

between the internal field of security and external security, traditionally related to

international conflicts and peace operations. On the contrary, as it will be discussed later,

critical security scholars claim a much closer intertwining of the two fields of security, until

74

the "two become one" (Bigo 2004). The main argument used to support such thesis focuses on

the transnational nature of the issues that started to be perceived as major threats to security

(of which TOC represents an important one), since they engendered a total

reconceptualization of the inside/outside relation.

The critical security literature indeed recognizes the Maastricht Treaty as the first step

towards the politicization and the later securitization of the topic of (becoming transnational)

organized crime. Despite being rather far from a mature definition of the issue as an actual

security threat, the Treaty undoubtedly granted a higher level of attention to the fight against

organized crime from the side of Member States, as demonstrated by the setup of an ad hoc

group on Organized Crime in September 1992 (Bunyan 1993, 3).

However, despite such openly claimed greater interest in the expansion of the cross-border

criminal activities among the EU countries, the Treaty of Maastricht did not provide any solid

nor unified definition of organized crime. In the Title VI of the Treaty, relative to the Co-

operation in the fields of Justice and Home Affairs, the Art. K1 mentions all the issues in need

crime lacks of a common working definition, replaced in the text by an “empty signifier”,

which will have to wait for the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997 to be importantly substantiated and

expanded (Maastricht Treaty 1992, quoted in Carrapico 2010, 46).

Probably the greatest innovation brought by the Maastricht Treaty in the JHA domain was the

declared will to give birth to a European agency, which could directly embody the Member

States’ cooperation on judicial and police matters (Maastricht Treaty 1992, Title VI, Art. K1

(9)). Based on the German idea of creating a FBI-like agency, the experts involved in the

negotiations, mostly belonging to the Trevi group, agreed on the constitution of the “Central

European Criminal Investigation Office”, better known as Europol (Council of the Trevi

Ministers 1991, 6). On the report of the meeting of the Trevi ministers held in Maastricht on 3

December 1991, it is possible to read that the purpose of Europol is set out as the need for:

A central organization to facilitate the exchange and the coordination of criminal

information, and the development of intelligence between Member States in respect of

crime extending across the borders of Member States, whether originating outside

Europe or not (Trevi Ministers 1991, quoted in Bunyan 1993, 3).

The Treaty therefore established an ad hoc group on Europol in 1992 mainly composed of

former Trevi group experts with the task of preparing a convention on police cooperation

fitting the needs and the geography of the new European Union. In 1995, the Europol

75

Convention was signed by the Member States but the new police agency could become fully

operational only in 1999, after all Member States ratified the convention (Carrapico and

Trauner 2013).

However, in the meanwhile the Trevi Ministers had decided in June 1993 to establish a Drugs

Unit within the Europol intelligence agency (EDU) which would become operational in the

shortest time as possible, despite the still pending coming into force of Europol. In the eyes of

the Trevi Group, the EDU was meant to provide “a form of cooperation in advance of a full

Convention on Europol” (Trevi Group 1993, 3). Indeed, Carrapico and Trauner claim that the

EDU was “expected to serve as a temporary platform until the entry into force of the Europol

Convention” (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 361). According to the ministerial agreement

establishing the EDU, the Unit was “to act as a non-operational team for the exchange and

analysis of intelligence in relation to illicit drug trafficking, criminal organizations […]

affecting two or more Member States” (Trevi Group 1993, 3). The non-operational nature of

the EDU becomes visible when looking at the main task assigned to the agency: the

production of annual general situation reports and analysis on drug-related crime, based on

non-personal information supplied by Member States and other sources (Carrapico and

Trauner 2013, 361).

At this point, a short theoretical consideration deserves our attention. Bearing in mind the

narrative on organized crime lengthily discussed in the previous chapter, it seems clear that

the European Union’s understanding of organized crime at the time of the Maastricht Treaty

did not match (yet) with the official international narrative on the issue originating from the

American domestic discourse, which will later influence the EU thematization of the topic.

Indeed, no mention whatsoever was made by the Member States of an “alien conspiracy” of

powerful and ruthless criminal organizations. And, most importantly, organized crime was

starting just at that time to get closer to the field of security, remaining still for now in the

domain of justice and domestic affairs.

Two explanations could make sense of such circumstance: first of all, the Maastricht Treaty

dates back to 1992 and, as it has been argued previously, the very internationalization and

consequential reception by many Western countries of the American discourse on organized

crime only really started after the UN Naples Conference in 1994. Before that year, the

international value of organized crime still strongly related to the domestic domain and the

phenomenon was not perceived yet as a transnational threat menacing the security of

democratic states. It would be like saying, then, that in 1992 the times were not mature yet for

76

the EU to absorb the TOC narrative coming from the other side of the Atlantic. Secondly, and

probably most importantly, the European experiment started with the Schengen area and

reinforced by the Maastricht Treaty provisions was shaping the continent in an utterly

innovative fashion, bringing about new and original considerations on security. Therefore, the

later influence exerted by the internationalized American-led narrative on TOC, mixed with

the unique features of the European Union history and recent rethinking of the internal

security space, shaped an interesting inflection of the security discourse on TOC that is

absolutely worth examining in its detailed features.

The Amsterdam Treaty and the Action Plan on the Combat against Organized Crime

The Amsterdam Treaty was signed on 2 October 1997 and came into force two years later.

The treaty was meant as an amendment to the previous Maastricht Treaty towards a more

transparent and democratic dimension of the European Union policies.

In fact, the greatest empirical step forward made by the Amsterdam Treaty concerned the

Third Pillar of the European Union: in Art. 1, listing the main objectives of the treaty, it is

possible to read at the paragraph (b), that it is of great interest for the Union

to maintain and develop the Union as an area of freedom, security and justice, in which

the free movement of persons is assured in conjunction with appropriate measures with

respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and

combating of crime (emphasis added) (Treaty of Amsterdam 1997)

According to the European Union, the great transformations involving the European

institutions and citizens required a total revision in the way of thinking the European space.

Therefore, the EU envisioned the creation of an area of freedom, security and justice, where

people could freely move across borders in accordance with the Schengen code and without

having to care about their security, which would be provided by an innovative conflation of

European countries would be entitled to have equal access to every state’s judicial system,

creating a truly harmonized European environment (European Council and Commission 1998,

3).

77

The birth of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, which few years later will be strongly

enhanced by the Tampere Program, entailed two major sets of consequences included in the

Amsterdam Treaty: first of all, the Amsterdam Treaty introduced the Schengen Convention

into the Union’s single institutional framework, “putting an end to the contradictions resulting

from two different separate systems” (European Council 2005b, 9). Secondly and most

importantly, the treaty brought part of the Third Pillar under the communitarian methods,

namely the visa and asylum policies and the rules for judicial cooperation in civil matters,

leaving the police and judicial cooperation as main topics of the JHA field (2005b, 10).

The introduction of the Schengen acquis into the EU institutional framework provided the

Union with the necessary internal legislation regulating the freedom of movement within the

Union’s borders. Despite the opting out of Great Britain and Ireland, and the special position

assumed by Denmark, the abolition of internal borders among Member States and few other

neighboring countries was normalized and set the basis for a truly internal harmonized Area

of Freedom, Security and Justice.

Contemporaneously, the shift of the visa, asylum and immigration policies from the Third

Pillar to the first one strongly reinforced the cooperation of the Member States on the

management of the EU external borders. What the Schengen acquis was meant to regulate

inside the European boundaries was complemented on the external dimension by the

“communitization” of the immigration policies addressing non-European citizens, now shaped

through Community decision-process methods (2005b, 9-10).

Transferring the external immigration domain to the First Pillar, the Justice and Home Affairs

field was left with the only task of enhancing the cooperation of the Member States in the

domains of police and criminal justice. Carrapico notices that, despite the alleged efforts made

by the European Union through the Amsterdam Treaty to render the EU policies and decision-

making processes more transparent and democratic, the provisions of the Title VI of the

Maastricht Treaty referring to the police and criminal justice cooperation were exempted by

such pledge for transparency. Remaining under the intergovernmental domain, “the

Parliament and the Court of Justice had no jurisdiction to review the validity or

proportionality of operations carried out by the police or other law enforcement services”

(Treaty of Amsterdam 1997, quoted in Carrapico 2010, 48).

In the scope of the Title VI of the treaty, containing the provisions about the police and

criminal justice cooperation, organized crime gained a priority position. Art. K.1 of the treaty

states that the objective of the Member States should be of “preventing and combating crime,

78

organized or otherwise, in particular terrorism, trafficking in persons and offenses against

children, illicit drug trafficking and illicit arms trafficking, corruption and fraud” (Treaty of

Amsterdam 1997). In comparison with the rather chaotic articles dedicated to the Third Pillar

in the Maastricht Treaty, the raising attention paid by the European Union to the phenomenon

of organized crime in the new treaty was fairly unambiguous.

The growing interest of the EU towards organized crime was not only witnessed by the place

it got in such fundamental agreements, but also by the introduction of the topic within the

political agendas of the European Council meetings. The phenomenon of organized crime was

representatives of the Member States decided during that gathering to commission a High

Level Group (HLG) of experts with the task to create an "Action Plan to Combat Organized

Crime" to be presented at the following European Council.

The 1997 Action Plan represents an extremely important moment in the evolution of the

European discourse on organized crime. It is indeed the very first official document on

organized crime drafted by the European Union and following a rhetorical line consistent with

the international post-Naples Conference narrative on TOC. Such theoretical shift is blatantly

demonstrated by the first lines of the introduction to the Plan:

Organized crime is increasingly becoming a threat to society as we know it and want to

preserve it. Criminal behavior no longer is the domain of individuals only, but also of

organizations that pervade the various structures of civil society, and indeed society as a

whole. Crime is increasingly organizing itself across national borders, also taking

advantage of the free movement of goods, capital, services and persons (emphasis added)

(Action Plan to Combat Organized Crime 1997).

Looking back at the discussion about the post-1994 international discourse on TOC described

in the previous chapter, it seems evident that the EU Action Plan owes much of its (not so)

innovative features to such narrative. Even a superficial comparison with the previous EU

reports dealing with the topic would show an unequivocal evolution in the thematization of

organized crime within the European discourse, following a growing tendency towards the

securitization of the issue.

In the first place, instead of the usual enumeration of the numerous criminal activities as the

objects to address and combat, in the 1997 Action Plan the experts discovered the “beauty of

simplification” in identifying the ultimate responsible for all the illegal activities on the

European territory in the category of criminal organizations. Crime was not only crime

79

anymore, it was “organized”. As claimed in the case of the Kefauver Committee in the

previous chapter, imagining criminal syndicates as well-organized and hierarchical groups

mentally amplifies the general perception of dangerousness embodied by these. The

transnationalization of such groups then -caused by a mix of exogenous factors such as the

end of the Cold War and, more specifically for Europe, the abolition of internal borders in the

Schengen area- further inflates the official discourse about organized crime until it becomes a

“threat to society as we know it and want to preserve it” (Edwards and Gill 2003, 22).

Therefore, we could look at the Action Plan to Combat Organized Crime as the document

sanctioning the adoption by the European Union’s institutions of the metanarrative on

transnational organized crime as reproduced by many international organizations such as the

UN and the G8, and the consequential involvement of the topic of TOC in the sphere of

security, through the process of securitization.

The Action Plan significantly affected the revision of the Title VI within the new framework

of the Amsterdam Treaty. Indeed, we could read the wide space dedicated to the provisions on

Europol in the 1997 treaty as an important consequence of the new perception of “threat”

caused by organized crime. Art. K.2.2 (a-d) strongly promoted the increase in cooperation and

information exchange among national law enforcement agencies and qualified Europol as the

very liaison between all of them. Europol was being designed to be a real transnational police

agency which would act both as director and coordinator of projects involving national police

groups and as facilitator for the gathering of information and data by the Member States'

police agencies (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 361).

In the last paragraph, the treaty commissioned Europol with the task to establish a “research,

documentation and statistical network on cross-border crime”: this meant above all the

assignment of the production of the annual report on organized crime analysis that had been

the EDU’s main job since 1993 (Treaty of Amsterdam 1997). Indeed, after the “sub-optimal”

results of the 1994 and 1995 annual reports, mostly due to the inconsistency among the

national parameters and data used to draft the documents, the European Council opted for an

“harmonization of national methodologies for the collection of data” under the supervision of

Europol (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 362). Hence, since 1997 the “Organized Crime

Situation Report” represented an important part of Europol’s work and the influence of these

documents on the policy-makers increased significantly thanks to the more refined and

analytical nature of the new reports and to the growing attention paid by the EU politicians to

the phenomenon of organized crime.

80

Towards the Implementation of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: the Tampere Program

The Treaty of Amsterdam was followed by several action plans promoted by the European

Commission and the Council to define the actual tools and measures for the implementation

of the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The examination of these minor,

operational texts can provide a lucid insight into the very meaning of the important

transformations that the Union was planning at that time on the topic of the fight against TOC.

Indeed, the textual clarity of the action plans and of other working documents is utterly

missing in the official treaties, which very often tend to sound blurry and obscure.

The action plan called for at the Cardiff European Council in June 1998 and adopted at the

following Council in Vienna at the end of the year, represents the perfect example of such

series of documents aiming at overcoming the obstacles on the way towards the

harmonization of policies in the domain of the states' cooperation in police and criminal

justice matters. Thanks to the schematic concision of its text, the 1998 Action Plan (also

called the Vienna Action Plan) on “How to best implement the provisions of the Treaty of

Amsterdam on the creation of an area of freedom, security and justice” shows some

interesting features portraying the changing face of the European understanding of security,

which will be useful to keep in mind for the theoretical reflections on the topic that will be

suggested later in this chapter. In order to clarify how the AFSJ would be effectively put into

practice, the Plan offers a paragraph to each one of the three constitutive parts of the new area

(namely freedom, security and justice). Under every heading, a list enumerates the topics and

our remark: under

the paragraph “An area of security” (par. B) the first mentioned issue is organized crime. No

better example could testify the rapid increase in attention paid by the Member States to the

topic of organized crime as a matter of security for the European Union. When compared with

the scope and the provisions dedicated to the subject in the Maastricht Treaty only six years

earlier, the prioritization of organized crime as a threat to the security of the EU territory

appears serious and clear-cut.

The 1998 Vienna Action Plan and other working documents set the ground for the 1999

Tampere European Council, organized to specifically discuss Justice and Home Affairs issues

(Elvins 2003, 28). The Tampere Council Conclusions and the homonym five-years program

drafted at that meeting, proved to be fundamental in the advance of the European Union

towards the implementation of the area of freedom, security and justice and even more

81

importantly, they offer us the bigger picture of the post-Maastricht EU space as imagined and

understood by its creators.

As already outlined in the previous works on the AFSJ, the action of the European Union’s

institutions was set on a binary direction: asylum and immigration policy on the one side,

falling under the First Pillar and therefore following supranational decision-process

mechanisms, and the “unionwide fight against crime” on the other, still under the Third Pillar

and hence under intergovernmental scrutiny (European Council 1999). Such division is

clearly shown in the structure of the Tampere Presidential Conclusions and, for the aim of our

analysis, a very remarkable feature is the clear emergence of cross-border organized crime

perceived as the main threat menacing the common European space.

Section C of the Tampere Presidential Conclusions was then entirely dedicated to the

“Unionwide fight against crime”. Leaving the analytics of the phenomenon to more didactic

and detailed documents, such conclusions tackled the longstanding European proposal of

creating a Union-wide system of transnational cooperation on criminal matters based on a mix

of Member States’ law enforcement agencies and European agencies specialized on the topic

(European Council 1999). Part IX of Section C (“Stepping up co-operation against crime”)

called for the participation of important actors, such as: the Member States’ authorities

investigating in cross-border crime, Europol and Eurojust. The national police agencies would

be connected through a “European Police Chiefs operational Task Force” created by the

European Council to “exchange, in cooperation with Europol, experience, best practices and

information on current trends in cross-border crimes” (European Council 1999). In order to

facilitate the collaboration among national police officers, the Council promoted the

establishment of a European Police College “for the training of senior law enforcement

officials” (European Council 1999).

To be sure, a key role was given to Europol, which had become operational just few months

before the Tampere Council, after the ratification by all Member States in 1998 of the Europol

Convention. Closely supported by the Council, Europol was receiving the eminent task of

collecting the data of the several Member States and of initiating, conducting or coordinating

investigations involving national teams. The growing importance of Europol as a first-line

agency in the European Union fight against TOC will be later analyzed more in detail.

However, it is paramount to keep in mind also now that Europol was and still is not subject to

any democratic scrutiny and therefore its actions might result in little transparency.

82

The third actor called in the Tampere Conclusions was another agency, Eurojust. In fact, it

was the Tampere Council itself that decided for the setting up of a new agency with the task of

“facilitating the proper coordination of national prosecuting authorities and of supporting

criminal investigations in organized crime cases”. Eurojust would be then composed of

national prosecutors, magistrates or police officers of equivalent competence “detached from

each member state according to its legal system” (European Council 1999). Therefore,

Member States’ police agencies, Europol and Eurojust were invited to act together to win the

European fight against TOC.

A year later, the Council issued a new document in line with the suggestions indicated at the

Tampere Council and with the New Millennium Strategies. The “Prevention and Control of

Organized Crime: A European Strategy for the Beginning of the New Millennium” responded

to the call for action claimed at the Tampere Council. The Background in the Part 1 of this

document offers a concise but satisfactory account of “how the threat of TOC is conceived at

the EU level” (Elvins 2003, 29).

Indeed, the text begins with the rather superficial acknowledgment of the increase in the level

of cross-border organized crime within the EU, highlighting the dangerous “multifaceted way

in which it is infiltrating into many aspects of society throughout Europe” (European Council

2000). The focus is then shifted to the criminal organizations themselves, which are portrayed

as business-like, sophisticated and highly dynamic enterprises. Their ability to easily cross

borders allows them “to entertain strong partnerships with criminal syndicates of other

countries” (Council of the EU 2000).

What is indeed most relevant in this way of representing transnational criminal groups, which

in general follows very closely the lines of the international official narrative, is the

recognition that:

Although the threat from organized crime groups outside the territory of the European

Union appears to be increasing, it is the groups that originate and operate throughout

Europe, composed predominantly of EU nationals and residents, which appear to pose the

significantly greater threat (European Council 2010).

Claiming that the criminal groups that mostly affect the European citizens’ security originate

within the European Union’s borders only apparently contradicts the mainstream international

discourse on TOC as a pluralist alien conspiracy, which spreads thanks to the increased

opportunities brought by the end of the Cold War and globalization. In fact, despite the

endorsement of an idea of organized crime as an “enemy within” rather than an alien coming

83

from an outside territory, the understanding of TOC promoted by the EU institutions from the

New Millennium Strategies on is faithful to the American-originated discourse of “groups of

individuals who collaborate for prolonged periods of time and who threaten- whether from

within or without- an otherwise satisfactory political economy” (emphasis added) (Edwards

and Gill 2003, 9).

Such image of transnational organized crime runs all along the 39 recommendations provided

by the European Council through this document. Chapter 2.2 of the report analyses and later

suggests measures to be taken for “preventing the penetration of organized crime in the public

and the legitimate private sector” (European Council 2010). Indeed, as Carrapico claims, the

text “echoes” the idea of a “global conspiracy” disrupting the “good functioning of the

European Union society” and underlines the “extent and professional capability of these

criminal organizations”, which concern their efforts to “seek to influence and hamper the

work of law enforcement and the judicial system” (Carrapico 2010, 50). To be sure, hence,

despite not being related to any ethnic origin of the criminal gangs, the conspiracy was still

utterly portrayed as “alien” to the rest of the legit society.

In the scope of the broad five-years Tampere Program for the implementation of the AFSJ,

the Millennium Strategy was followed by a joint report of the European Commission and

Europol in 2001, a document created with the intent of moving closer “Towards a European

Strategy to Prevent Organized Crime”. In this comprehensive text, Europol and the

Commission tried to advance a common working definition of organized crime to be used

within the EU and national institutions, in the framework of the wider strategy that was being

set in those years and envisioned to fight the phenomenon on a European-wide basis. Clearly,

any grand strategy could be truly effective only if “the different agents” could “agree on the

object to be tackled and its characteristics”; only so, the “measure, instruments, plans and

information could be put together and be commonly developed” (Carrapico 2010, 50).

Therefore, the document laid a set of eleven characteristics, among which at least six of them

should belong to a criminal group in order to fall under the operational category of “organized

crime”. Of these eleven features, four of them (in italics in the following list) needed to be

necessarily identified in the analyzed gang:

1. Collaboration of more than two people;

2. Each with own appointed task;

3. For a prolonged or indefinite period of time;

84

4. Using some form of discipline or control;

5. Suspected of the commission of serious criminal offenses;

6. Operating at an international level;

7. Using violence or other means suitable for intimidation;

8. Using commercial or business-like structure;

9. Engaged in money laundering;

10. Exerting influence on politics, the media, public administration, judicial authority or the economy;

11. Determined by the pursuit of profit and/or power. (Commission 2001)

As in the case of the United Nation's definition of transnational organized crime mentioned in

the previous chapter, Letizia Paoli's criticism holds true also for the EU context: when made

operational, the notion of TOC is deprived of much of all the most typical features that

compose the official discourse on the phenomenon. Adopting a “common denominator”

definition allows for the widening of the targeted groups and therefore can be used to justify

the development of security technologies and standardized mechanisms and to increase the

security agencies' powers (Carrapico 2010, 52).

The post- 9/11 Evolution of the EU Fight against TOC

The 2001 terrorist attacks to the United States significantly influenced the European Union's

approach to the internal security. The alarmist tones of the American public officials claiming

for the overly dangerous intertwining of terrorism and transnational organized crime did not

take too long to reach the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and start shaping new and more

rigid security mechanisms. The connection between the two threats, which had already been a

taken-for-granted assumption in the EU discourse on internal security, gained greater

momentum after the Al-Qaeda attacks. The 2004 Security Strategy, the 2004 Hague Program

and the 2005 New Strategy for the External Dimension of Justice and Home Affairs are

unanimous in considering the two phenomena as closely tied together. In this paragraph, the

focus will be mainly on the Hague Program since it represents the natural continuation of the

EU work on transnational organized crime; the security strategies, which obviously refer to a

broader outline of the rethinking of the concept of security in Europe, will be fundamental in

85

the following section dealing more closely with the place occupied by TOC in the new

understanding of security in the EU.

The promotion of the Hague Program by the European Commission and the following

endorsement of the Council in 2004 was mostly the result of a partial failure of the previous

Tampere Program started in 1999. Indeed, the many objectives set by the participants of the

Tampere meeting could not be reached in the five-year term of application of the program. At

the Hague European Council then, the national representatives accepted the document drafted

by the EU Commission and listing the ten absolute priorities for the strengthening of the area

of freedom, security and justice during the following five years.

Interestingly, despite the enormous attention paid internationally to the fight against terrorism,

the section dealing with the security of the internal European space blatantly provides more

room to the issue of organized crime than to the terrorist threat. Again, Europol is claimed to

be absolutely central to any strategy concerning the fight against TOC; therefore the Member

States are urged to

Enable Europol, in cooperation with Eurojust, to play a key role in the fight against

serious cross-border organized crime and terrorism by: ratifying and effectively

implementing the necessary legal instruments by the end of 2004; providing all necessary

high quality information to Europol in good time; encouraging good cooperation between

their competent national authorities and Europol (European Council 2004).

With such strong recommendation towards the Member states, the European Council was

finalizing the uncontested primacy of Europol within the security field of the European

Union. Probably the most important empirical step forward designed by the Hague Program

was the replacement of the annual organized crime reports commissioned to Europol with

Organized Crime Threat Assessment reports (OCTA). The new documents were thought to

“implement a more intelligence-led law enforcement approach at the European level”

(Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 365). The shift from a merely descriptive document, as was the

former situation report, to a text that would develop on a risk-assessment and predictive line,

entailed an important qualitative change in the way such reports could influence the Council’s

decision-making and the Member States in dealing with the issue.

Carrapico and Trauner have argued in a recent article that the post-Hague Europol have been

able to exert a much greater influence on the European policy-making in the field of security

than it was actually provisioned by its mandate, until reaching a significant degree of

autonomy from the EU institutions. After the creation of the OCTA report, external events and

86

particular political circumstances indeed enabled Europol to become a powerful intelligence

agency, which could concretely enforce its understanding of cross-border organized crime on

the single Member States, also in cases where it was “slightly counter-cultural for many EU

Member States” (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 365).

In the making of the EU’s fight against TOC one that is truly shaped on the intelligence-led

law enforcement approach, an important role was played, according to the two scholars, by

the UK Presidency of the European Union. The terrorist bombing that hit London in July

2005 heavily directed the British way of dealing with the European security towards a

policing paradigm (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 366). Indeed, in October 2005 the European

Justice and Home Affairs ministers agreed on the establishment of a European Criminal

Intelligence Model (ECIM), which would have been implemented through the newly

commissioned Europol’s Organized Crime Threat Assessment (OCTA). The OCTA reports

were hence becoming a potent laboratory through which the Europol could not only influence

the Council’s decision-making and the Member States’ agencies but also rethink and structure

Europol’s own work and priorities in the management of the European security area

(Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 366).

The growing importance of the OCTA reports was fully acknowledged and further stimulated

by the 2005 EU Commission’s communication to the Council and the Parliament on

“Developing a strategic concept on tackling organized crime”. The Commission understood as

a priority the necessary strengthening of “information gathering and analysis” by the

intelligence agency, in the conviction that only by improving the study of the phenomenon an

effective policy strategy could see the light (European Commission 2005). Clearly, being the

creation of reports Europol’s main task, the Commission was implicitly bestowing the

uncontested leadership in the fight against crime on the European Police Agency.

The Fight against TOC in the EU after the Lisbon Treaty

The Lisbon Treaty signed in 2007 and ratified in 2009 did not bring any factual change to the

European-led fight against organized crime but it importantly changed the face of the

European Union institutions and competences by deleting the artificial and often

contradictory pillars division. After 2009 then, the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice

would be characterized by the shared competences of the Member States and the EU

institutions on the topics included therein.

87

On the thrust of the political changes brought by the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council

created in 2009 the Stockholm Program with the aim of leading the following five-year term

in the field of the AFSJ (2009-2014). Together with the Internal Security Strategy designed by

the EU Commission in 2010, the Stockholm Program has provided a further legal and

political development of the field of internal security in the European space. Indeed, Guild

and Carrera argue that not only have the AFSJ officials kept working on the relative topics as

if they were still under the Third Pillar, but also that the “depillarization” emerging from the

Lisbon Treaty is allowing for a contamination of (formal) ex-First Pillar fields, such as

immigration and external borders control, through the export of intelligence-led law

enforcement mechanisms, especially towards other EU agencies such as Frontex (Guild and

Carrera 2011, 3). It is very important to emphasize this concept of “contamination” or, said

otherwise, of continue exchange of practices between European agencies for the next section

of this chapter, which will try to make sense of the theoretical evolution of the field and

practices on security in the European Union.

Much of the attention paid by the Council in the Section 4 “A Europe that protects” of the

Stockholm Program regarding the internal security of the EU, and therefore cross-border

organized crime, concerned the need for improvement in the exchange and gathering of

information and data for a more efficient work of the EU agencies dealing with the

transnational threats menacing the European states (European Council 2009). Particularly

interesting for our analysis, is the paragraph 4.2, which invites the Commission to work

together with the Council “to implement the Information Management Strategy for EU

Internal Security”, namely an important program for the revision and improvement of the

already existing data collection and exchange mechanisms within the EU. The Council

specifically addresses the need to develop a European Information Exchange Model, which is

necessary for the good functioning of the EU agencies tackling above all cross-border

criminal organizations and terrorism.

Once again, and with more and more accurate and detailed provisions, the Council pledged

for greater cooperation among Member States and European law-

beyond the longstanding hegemony of Europol in the field of the fight against transnational

threats, the Stockholm Program envisioned a tighter cooperation and information exchange

between the most important security agencies of the EU, namely Europol, Eurojust and

Frontex. Indeed, the introduction of Frontex (the EU agency providing for the external

borders' control) in the collaboration system demonstrates the close relationship between the

88

control of the external borders, involving the broader topic of immigration and asylum

seeking, and the transnational criminal threats affecting the EU internal security.

It is in the progressive blurring of the lines between inside and outside security started from

the creation of the Schengen area and continuing until now that the critical security scholars

understand the changing face of security within the European Union. Transnational organized

crime clearly occupies a primary position in this new way of thinking and doing security.

After having analyzed the evolution and the growing attention paid to TOC as a security

threat by the European institutions, it is the time to understand critically the bigger picture of

the European re-writing of the field of internal (and external) security and the place taken

within it by TOC.

The Threat of TOC in the European Security Discourse

The previous pages have attempted a detailed analysis of treaties, official report and political

events concerning the topic of organized crime in the European Union with the purpose of

demonstrating on a temporal basis the evolution of the political discourse on transnational

organized crime in the EU. Such long review has been a very useful tool to critically

understand the way a topic can be subject to a process of securitization and reach the higher

levels of security politics by being recognized as a dangerous threat to society. This has

indeed been the case of the narrative on transnational organized crime within the European

political institutions after the emergence of the borderless internal domain of security shaped

by the Schengen Agreement.

Despite being satisfactory for the quite limited aim of proving that the securitization of the

issue effectively took place, the examination pursued in the previous pages does not account

for the whole critical understanding of the transnational threat embodied by TOC in Europe.

not only to show that securitization really happened, but also to try to understand the factors

that have led the European political elites to transform a topic that was for long time a regular

domestic issue into one that strongly affects the security of every European citizens, and to

explain the consequences that have stemmed from such changes.

89

In order to do so, the narration of transnational organized crime as a security threat needs to

be understood as part of the broader development of the field of internal security in the

European Union that has spurred from the abolition of the internal borders in 1985 and is still

going on now. The great transformations that followed this event have been the central topic

of most part of the critical security speculation of the scholars belonging to the Paris School

led by Didier Bigo.

Their research has focused on few and highly interconnected subjects, such as the political

discourse on global security and the new freedom/security trade-

formation of a European internal field of security, the conflation of external and internal

control and surveillance that have been created and performed by the new security agencies of

the European Union. To be sure, the many themes just mentioned are together embedded in

European security situation today it is fundamental to look at them comprehensively.

However, to provide more clarity to the following section of this chapter, I will artificially

divide them as I have done in the short list above.

Tackling the Explanatory Questions

In the first place, it would be recommendable to start unpacking the above mentioned

questions that might help us in the task of properly facing the proposed topic. To proceed

towards clear and complete answers, it could useful to phrase the questions in this way: What

elements have enabled the new EU political discourse to remodel a topic that had always

belonged to the field of domestic politics into one representing a major threat for the

European security? And which consequences have these changes in the security paradigm

entailed?

The Internal Field of Security and the Transnationalization of Threats

The first and rather straightforward answer to these questions would probably focus on the

new spatial dimension of the European Union in the post-1985 era. After the opening of the

borders between Member States as envisioned by the signatories of the Schengen Agreement,

the categories of domestic and foreign politics inside the European states were obviously

undergoing a major change. The abolition of the internal boundaries allowed for a truly

90

innovative free movement of people, goods and capitals which started to disrupt the territorial

basis of the longstanding modern concept of national sovereignty, understood as the ability to

govern the population of a circumscribed territory (Bigo 2000, 173).

The European politicians that took part to the long process of institutional change and opening

of the borders were well-aware of the risk they were running by removing all border checks

between the Member States. What in the past could be properly controlled and, in case, left

out of the national space because considered dangerous for the population’s security, was now

allowed to freely flow from one state to the other. Indeed, the idea that the increased freedom

of movement enjoyed by the European citizens caused a parallel increase in the criminal

activities was the foundational justification that allowed the political élite and the security

practitioners to create a new field of the security, the Internal Security.

The field of internal security became, with the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty, part of the newly

institutionalized Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ). The European Union then,

was incorporating two differentiated domains of security: the field of external security and

that of internal security. External security embodied the traditional modern understanding of

security, referring to the protection and defense of the external borders of the EU and the

diplomatic relations of the European Union with other countries. Despite a long quiescence

due to the Cold War, the European collaboration in the sector of defense was starting to move

some steps towards a greater integration and a more assertive position on the international

stage.

The internal field, on the other side, represented the reproduction on a European, borderless

scale of the typical domestic concern for public order and control of criminality. Didier Bigo

argues that since the creation of the field of internal security, the European establishment has

been discursively creating and strengthening a “regime of truth”, which would enable the

enforcement of innovative and often illiberal forms of security practices (Bigo 2008, 12). The

regime of truth Bigo talks about is the one shaped by the European politicians and claiming

the growing danger of transnational threats that, because of the relaxation of the boundaries’

controls, were attempting more and more seriously to the security and safety of the European

population.

Within the broad narrative of the transnationalization of threats, the issue of organized crime

played indeed an absolute primary role. The envisioning of growing networks of well-

organized criminal syndicates, operating from state to state without having to bother about the

extensive police border controls that were once common in Europe, was definitely not a hard

91

task for the EU politicians that were also starting to receive international inputs to endorse the

American-born narrative on TOC through specialized conferences and popular culture13.

Thanks to the previous analysis offered in this chapter, it has been possible to clearly read the

securitarian transformations experienced by the topic of organized crime through subsequent

official documents dealing with the topic at the EU institutional level.

Global (in)security and the freedom/security tradeoff

The scholars of the Paris School are unanimous in claiming that portraying security threats as

transnational allowed for the diffusion of the new concept of global security. Since the

transnational blurs “the distinction between the external and the internal” and destabilizes

related concepts like “sovereignty, territoriality and security”, the old notion of state security

can no longer be used against threats that cross borders and affect all citizens without

discrimination of nationality (Bigo 2000, 172). By building the discourse on the

transnationality of the new threats, the politicians were able to diffuse a new and much more

comprehensive understanding of security.

Bigo reads the concept of global security promoted by the EU establishment as one that aims

at the “personal survival of each of its constitutive members, regardless of where they are”

(2000, 181). The shift is a major one since, by claiming the need for global security, the

political institutions are no longer just responsible to defend the institutional survival of the

state collectivity but also that of the single citizens that populate the Union. The mechanisms

of control enforced to pursue this new kind of security are therefore expanded to the whole

population because the state (or any other political bigger entity) is now entitled to provide for

the “individual security of each one of us” (2000, 182).

Paradoxically, framing the security question in the direction of a continuously growing risk

for the people, “constructs politically and socially” an environment of insecurity and unease

statement is only apparently so: when the terms of the utterance are explained, such critical

assertion sounds admissible and brilliant.

Indeed, the transnationality itself of the new menaces like TOC implies believing in the

transverse existence of these subjects that allegedly endanger the safety of the European

population. It is like claiming that the threat “walks among us” without actually being able to

13 For a more detailed understanding of transnational organized crime as an American-originated discourse, please refer to the section dedicated to this topic in the second chapter.

92

recognize it, as in the original narration of the “enemy within” (Balzacq et al. 2010, 4). The

securitization of issues claimed as transnational, hence, nurtures a constant climate of

insecurity and fear among the people, which make them agree on and endorse all later

political calls for greater security provisions regardless of how harmful they can be of

individuals’ liberty.

The European internal security narrative has indeed also entailed a rewriting of the notions of

freedom and liberty through their entanglement with the new understanding of global security.

Then, before entering the core of the discussion about the (illiberal) surveillance practices put

in place by the new European security agencies, it would be useful to investigate the

relationship between security and freedom as reconceptualized in the framework of the Areas

of Freedom, Security and Justice of the European Union.

As Bigo et al. have argued in an important study on illiberal security practices in the EU

(2007), the official European discourse claims that “security is the first freedom” (Bigo et al.

2007, 1). Such an utterance engenders consequences of great proportions because it clearly

gives a priority position to security over freedom, where the latter is considered by the

European officials as merely “essentialized in the freedom of movement” (Bigo 2006, 38).

Although in the political discourse starting from the mid-1980s the new security provisions

were strongly claimed as being just “compensatory measures” of the greater freedom of

movement enjoyed by the European citizens, in reality the scope of security has expanded

well beyond the enlargement of liberty provisions (Elvins 2003, 45). It is worth quoting Bigo

on this topic:

Freedom is seen through the eyes of police, intelligence services, customs and

immigration agencies and all the other professional bodies of management of fear and

unease. Freedom is reduced to a place to be protected and a place under threat. [..] If

strengthening freedom is strengthening the borders against threats by others, then

strengthening freedom is the task of the authorities to secure a place, to protect, monitor

and supervise the people inside and the people on the move (Bigo 2006, 41).

Therefore, the freedom-security tradeoff that emerges from the new internal securitarian

approach promoted by the European Union is quite far from the democratic and libertarian

discourse proclaimed in many declarations of principles as foundational of the Union (Bigo

2006, 39). It is rather one fitting the “permanent emergency view”, where security is

conceived as the permissive condition to freedom and hence personal liberties can be

suspended every time that security is at risk (2006, 39).

93

Bigo clarifies, however, that despite the existence of illiberal practice in the European field of

security, the European system is not one that risks a return to “soft-fascism” nor one

practices” and politicians often indulge in the “temptation of using the argument of an

exceptional moment” correlated to the spreading of transnational violent organizations to

“justify the violation of basic human rights”, we are still living in “liberal regimes” (Bigo

2008, 12).

The European Security Agents and the New Security Practices

The focus on surveillance as the main security practice used by the European security

agencies (first of all Europol) is one of the most fruitful research topic of the Paris School.

Didier Bigo, Sergio Carrera, Elspeth Guild and R.B.J Walker have taken part during the last

decade of a long-term project aiming at analyzing the nature of the security practices in

Europe. The results of their research have detected the widespread use of “specific illiberal

practices by contemporary liberal regimes in Europe” (Bigo et al. 2007, 1).

A great deal of attention was given by the researchers to the recent introduction of threat

assessments as the common way of drafting reports in the European security agencies. The

practice of risk assessment implies, according to the writers, the “reliance on worst-case

scenarios” which consequentially frees such documents “from any careful analysis of

probabilities”, rather registering “maximum dangers from single instances” (Bigo et al. 2007,

6).

In this context, the Organized Crime Threat Assessment reports (OCTA) represent a perfect

example showing how the methodology used to generate these documents can be problematic

in the relation with the reality of what is under scrutiny. Carrapico and Trauner maintain that

the shift operated by the Hague Program, which sanctioned the change from a merely

descriptive situation report to one that is shaped on risk-assessment, has produced an

important transformation in the way Europol deals with the data gathered directly or from the

Member States about TOC and the use that the agency does of the document to exert

influence on the European Council’s decision making. Indeed, considering that Europol has

undoubtedly become the most relevant European agency in the fight against cross-border

crime, when granted with the task of defining the level of danger provoked by TOC, the

agents will portray the issue as being a serious threat to the security of the citizens and

therefore requiring stronger political attention (Carrapico and Trauner 2013, 365). The two

scholars, thus, share Bigo et al.’s idea of threat-assessment reports as providers of worst-case

94

scenario analysis and reveal the instrumentality of such move for the gaining of importance of

determined agencies working in the field of European security (Carrapico and Trauner 2013

Bigo et al. 2007).

It is therefore not surprising that the issuance of these reports plays an important role in the

reproduction of the discourse of (in)security that often justifies the claim for “emergency rules

and derogations of the rule of law”, spurring “the development of technologies of mass

surveillance at the transnational level and the massive exchange of individual data” and

allowing for “the merging of the role and missions of military, police and intelligence

services” (Bigo et al. 2007, 7). This last sentence introduces us to another very important

topic developed by Bigo in the scope of the European security field, which is the progressive

conflation of the external and the internal fields of security on the continent.

The Merger of the External and the Internal Fields of Security and the Ban-opticon

As it was mentioned in a previous paragraph, when the European Union was created by the

Maastricht Treaty in 1992 it comprised two separated domains of security, an external and an

internal one. Didier Bigo and other scholars of the Paris School argue that such clear-cut

division between the two fields is no longer effective and rather obsolete in Europe (Bigo

internal security is still managed by the Justice and Home Affairs department of the European

Union, it does in fact not solely refers to the internal issues of the Union. The same discourse

is valid for the external security: many actions taken by the EU on the international

diplomatic stage relate indeed to internal security issues, such as TOC, but also terrorism and

immigration. To say it with Bigo, “the Europeanization process” has interfered “with purely

national logic and has invalidated analysis of internal security as an isolated phenomenon”

(Bigo 2000, 173).

The creation and reproduction of a security discourse based on the claim of the

transnationalization of threats and the consequential need for a more global security has made

necessary a continuous exchange between the inside and the outside, until the very divisor

lines have started to fade out. As in the case of the fight against transnational organized crime,

but maybe even more evidently for issues concerning migration and refugees, “internal

security has implied the collaboration with foreign countries and dissatisfaction with clear

lines between inside and outside, state and society, sovereignty and identity” (2000, 174).

95

The bigger argument provided by the supporters of the external/internal security merger is the

emergence of new security actors, such as Europol and Frontex, which represent a

combination of the two traditional, differentiated security agencies: the military and the

police. The nature of the new actors reflect the alleged transnationality of the new threats and

therefore they demonstrate the convergence of the external defense and the internal policing

on the same enemy (2000, 175). The security practitioners of the new agencies could be

figuratively imagined, according to Bigo, as walking along the surface of a Möbius strip14 and

thus not able to detect the line between inside and outside ( 2000, 176).

The growing confusion of inside/outside sends us back to the important topic of borders.

Previously, it has been argued that after the opening of the internal European boundaries, the

frontier dividing the external from the internal side of the European Union had been

transferred to the extremities of the continent. Despite being correct, this allegation is in fact

not complete. Drawing on Etienne Balibar’s insight on European borders, Nick Vaughan-

Williams claims that the responses to the new transnational threats have broadened and

multiplied the conception of border in the understanding of the European security agencies

(Vaughan-Williams 2008, 63). The idea of border is then deprived of its topographic, fixed

meaning and rather comes to be understood as a continuously displacing concept attached to

the individual rather than to a material place. As Elspeth Guild put it, “these borders could be

found everywhere” (Guild 2003, 103).

To be sure, such change marks a political redefinition of great magnitude: it is, according to

the critical security scholars of the Paris School, the very shift towards a post-modern world,

where the conception of sovereignty as we have understood it until now has lost all its

hermeneutic power (Bigo 2008, 15). As a natural consequence, the tenets of the state security

claims based on national belonging have undergone a long process of transformation until

they have been redefined along new lines. What has been engendered is indeed a total

overhaul of the political paradigm: as Etienne Balibar has written, the borders represent “no

longer the shores of politics but the space of the political itself” (emphasis added) (Balibar

1998, 220). The border has then been simplified until it has become a mere conceptual

frontier between who is inside the recognized political space and who falls irremediably

outside such line.

14 For the explanation of the theory of the Möbius strip, please refer to the first chapter in the section dedicated to the Paris School.

96

Didier Bigo has given a major contribution to the theoretical reconceptualization of the new

political and securitarian framework by introducing the notion of ban-opticon15 (2008). As

mentioned in the first chapter, the term ban-opticon refers to the sum of practices and attitudes

of the political body reflecting the current political and security discourse in Europe (2008,

11). In other words, the ban-opticon is but one example of governmentality, the one adopted

today by the European institutions and agencies.

It is one that, through the building of a strong and expanding narration of transnational

threats, has allowed the European political class to create new forms of exclusion and

surveillance on the excluded categories. Indeed, ban-opticon signifies a system where

surveillance and control (included in the Foucauldian concept of “opticon”) are focused on

“banned” (read excluded) categories within society. In here lies the very innovative feature of

the ban-opticon governmentality: the mechanisms of control, which are put in place to

guarantee the security of the system, are enforced on categories of people that are transverse

to state societies and therefore can no longer be identified just for their national belonging.

Such new kind of discrimination will rather affect groups of people affiliated to certain

religions, ethnicities, criminal groups, but also more in general persons in conditions of

poverty or marginalization. However, the securitization of the fight against such categories

has not led to any growing feeling of security and safety among the population. Rather, as

previously discussed, the securitization of the (alleged) transnational issues has caused a

parallel insecuritization of society.

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate how the European Union has developed, through a

great amount of treaties and official documents, a security discourse based on the emergence

of new and dangerous transnational threats requiring a more global approach to security. The

change operated within the domain of security in the EU has led the two previously divided

fields of external and internal security -and the corresponding agencies- to merge into a single

apparatus focused on the same, cross-border, multifaceted threats. The natural difficulty of

individuating the members of the menacing groups, among which transnational criminal

organizations play a very significant role, has allowed for the implementation of often illiberal

security practices aiming at the surveillance of the excluded and targeted categories,

considered threatening for the well-functioning of society. But instead of providing a higher

level of security, the political institutions have in this way only created a stronger and

enduring environment of insecurity and unease among the citizens.

15 For a description of the notion of ban-opticon, please refer to the section dedicated to the Paris School in the first chapter.

97

Hopefully, thanks to this last theoretical insight in the critical understanding of the European

discourse on security, the question posed at the beginning of this section can be considered

sufficiently answered. In order to really solve the problem of organized crime, the European

Union should put into effect a general rethinking of its security discourse and of the practices

involved.

98

Conclusion

The main purpose of this dissertation was to engage in an exercise of deconstruction that

could result in an alternative reading of the political efforts put in place to fight against

transnational organized crime, with a special insight in the European way of dealing with the

issue. The previous three chapters have indeed attempted to provide an understanding of the

security discourse constructed around the topic of transnational organized crime in its most

recent evolutions.

The adoption of the theoretical framework of the critical thought applied to the field of

security studies has been certainly paramount in succeeding in such aim. To say it with one of

the fathers of the theory, thinking “critically” means in the first place “making difficult” what

until now has been considered utterly normal and easy to grasp (Foucault 1988). Therefore, in

order to read through the lines of the political approach to a specific subject, it is fundamental

to first understand that such attitude does not represent the only

insight is but one of many conceivable ways of narrating the phenomenon.

In the awareness of the existence of several different interpretations of reality, lies the very

core feature of all the contributions to the field of the Critical Studies on Security discussed in

the scope of the first chapter. Among them, the tenets of the speculation of the so-called

Copenhagen School and Paris School have proved to perfectly fit the task assigned to this

dissertation. The topic of transnational organized crime has been, hence, analyzed from the

angle of (in)securitization, which is the belief that a political issue can be discursively and

practically transformed into a security question deserving special and (often) emergency

responses. This process of securitization generates a parallel increase in the perception of

unease among the population, making citizens feel more and more insecure because of the

new threat.

This theoretical approach allows shifting the focus from the mere analysis of the policies put

in place to fight against the problem, towards the way the problem itself has been politically

constructed. The second section of the thesis has indeed examined the historical “journey” of

the discourse on organized crime, starting from the 1930s until its latest definition as a major

99

threat to the global security of the citizens. Digging into its political path, it has been

demonstrated that the current understanding of organized crime stems from the American

domestic conceptualization of TOC as a “pluralist alien conspiracy” endangering the perfect

functioning of the good American society.

Such conception of organized crime could be exported in the international arena when the end

of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet enemy set the permissive conditions for the

development of a new international security discourse. The increasing transnationality of old,

domestic threats was held as the key point of the new idea of security that was becoming, in

the discourses of the politicians and in the practices of the security agents, more and more

global.

Organized crime came to be perceived as the most threatening among the new transnational

menaces. In fact, the real benefit of adopting a critical security point of view is the ability to

reveal the political instrumentality lying behind the political claim of the growing cross-

border criminal activities. As particularly visible from the study on the European Union

presented in the third chapter, the reproduction of an image of organized crime as a

transnational threat affecting the global (in)security of all citizens has allowed the European

politicians and security practitioners to call for greater inter-state and supranational

collaboration in the field of law enforcement.

The case of the European Union has offered indeed a meaningful example of how

institutionalizing a similar narrative on TOC can have a powerful impact on the typologies of

security practices enforced on the population. Transnational organized crime has represented

since the mid-1980s one of the greatest concerns in the framework of the internal security

field of the EU, born after the abolition of the borders brought by the Schengen Agreement.

Indeed, in the context of the borderless Union, Bigo and the other Paris School researchers

argue that the claim made by politicians about the spreading of transnational violence and

criminality has allowed for the formation of security practices that often exceed the realm of

liberty.

The aim of this dissertation has therefore been achieved: thanks to the theoretical instruments

provided by the critical thought, it was possible to reveal the mechanisms of power that

underpin the creation and reproduction of the security discourse and practices concerning the

phenomenon of transnational organized crime. To be sure, such critical exercise has been

focused on the pars destruens of the process, providing a different understanding of the topic,

but leaving to further research the study of innovative and alternative ways of thinking and

100

tackling organized crime. In this task, the branch of critical thought led by Ken Booth and

focusing on emancipation could definitely represent a useful starting point for further

speculation in this direction.

101

Bibliography

Acharya A. (1997), The Periphery as the Core: The Third World and Security Studies, in Krause K.

and Williams M.C. (eds), Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London, UCL Press.

Adorno T. W. and Horkheimer M. (1979), Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, Verso.

Allum F. et al. (2010), Defining and Defying Organized Crime: Discourse, Perceptions and Reality,

Routledge, London and New York.

Aradau C. (2001), Beyond Good and Evil: Ethics and Securitization/Desecuritization Techniques,

Rubikon, International Forum of Electronic Publications. Available at

http://venus.ci.uw.edu.pl/Brubikon/forum/claudia2.htm

Ashley R.K. (1984), The Poverty of Neorealism, International Organization, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 225-

286.

Ayoob M. (1997), Defining Security: A Subaltern Realist Perspective, in Krause K. and Williams

M.C. (eds), Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London, UCL Press.

Balibar E., (1998) The borders of Europe, in Cheah P. and Robbins B. (eds) Cosmopolitics: Thinking

and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis MN, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 216–233.

Balzacq T. et al. (2010), Security Practices, International Studies Encyclopedia Online. Balzacq T. et

al. (2010), Security Practices, International Studies Encyclopedia Online. Available at

http://www.didierbigo.com/documents/SecurityPractices2010.pdf .

Barkawi T. and Laffey M. (2006), The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies, Review of

International Studies, Vol. 32, pp. 329–352.

Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage Publications.

Benjamin W. (1977), These on the Philosophy of History, in Zohn H. (eds), Illuminations, New York,

Shocken, pp. 260-266.

102

Bigo D. (2000), When Two Become One: Internal and external Securitization in Europe, in Kelstrup

M. and Williams M. (eds), International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration,

Power, Security and Community, London, Routledge, pp. 171-204.

Bigo D. (2001), The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies), in Albert M., Jacobson D.,

and Lapid J.(eds), Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory,

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–116.

Bigo D. (2006), Liberty, Whose Liberty? The Hague Program and the Conception of Freedom, in

Balzacq T. and Carrera S. (eds), Security Versus Freedom? A Challenge for Europe's Future,

Ashgate e-book.

Bigo D. (2007), Policing Insecurity Today: Defense and Internal Security, London, Palgrave/

Macmillan.

Bigo D. (2008), Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon, in Bigo D. and Tsoukala A.

(eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty. Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11, London,

Routledge, pp. 10-48.

Bigo D. et al. (2007), The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security: Mid-Term Report

on the Results of the Challenge Project, The Center for European Policy Studies. Available at:

http://aei.pitt.edu/7404/2/7404.pdf.

Booth K. (1991a), Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice, International Affairs,

Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 527-545.

Booth K. (1991b), Security and Emancipation, Review of International Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4,

pp.313-326.

Booth K. (1997), Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist, in Krause K. and Williams M.C.

(eds), Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London, UCL Press

Booth K. (2007), Theory of World Security, New York, Cambridge University Press.

Breen Smyth M. et al. (2008), Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction, Critical Studies on

Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-5.

103

Bunyan T. (1993), Trevi, Europol and the European State, in Van Den Heuvel H. (eds), Statewatching

the New Europe: a handbook on the European State, European Journal on Criminal Policy and

Research, Vol. 1, No. 4, Chapter 1.

Buzan B. (1983), People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations,

Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press.

Buzan B. (1991), People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Pos-

Cold War Era, Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Buzan B. et al. (1998), Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, Lynne Rienner Publisher.

Campbell D. (1992), Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity,

Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Carrapico H. (2010), The Evolution of the European Union’s Understanding of Organized Crime and

its Embedment in the EU Discourse, in Allum F. et al. (eds), Defining and Defying Organized

Crime: Discourse, Perceptions and Reality, London, Routledge.

Carrapico H. and Trauner F. (2013), Europol and its Influence on EU Policy-making on Organized

Crime: Analyzing Governance Dynamics and Opportunities, Perspectives on European Politics and

Society, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 357-371.

C.A.S.E Collective (2006), Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Network Manifesto, Security

Dialogue, Vol.37, No.4, pp. 443-487.

Council of the Trevi Ministers (1991), The development of Europol. Report to the European Council in

Maastricht, December 1991. Available at: http://www.statewatch.org/semdoc/from-trevi-to-

maastricht.html.

Council of the Trevi Ministers (1993), Ministerial Agreement on the Establishment of the Europol

Drugs Unit. Available at: http://database.statewatch.org/e-library/1993-pre-033.pdf.

Cox R. (1981), Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,

Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol. 10, No.2, pp. 126-155.

104

Davis L.M et al (2010), Long-Term Effects of Law Enforcement’s Post-9/11 Focus on

Counterterrorism and Homeland Security, Rand Corporation Safety and Justice. Available at:

http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG1031.pdf

Den Boer M. (1998), Taming the Third Pillar: Improving the Management of Justice and Home Affairs

Cooperation in the EU, Maastricht, European Institute of Public Administration Publications.

Der Derian J. (1989), The Boundaries of Knowledge and Power in International Relations, in Der

Derian J. and Shapiro M.J. (eds), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Reading of

World Politics, New York, Lexington Books, pp. 3-10.

Der Derian J. (1993a), The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard, in Campbell

D. and Dillon M. (eds), The Political Subject of Violence, Manchester, Manchester University

Press, pp. 94-113

Der Derian J. (1993b), ACT IV: Fathers (and sons), Mother Courage (and her children), and the dog,

the cave and the beef, in Rosenau J. (eds), Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations,

Oxford, Westview Press, pp. 83-96.

Der Derian J. and Shapiro M.J. (1989), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Reading of

World Politics, New York, Lexington Books.

Der Derian J. (2009), Critical Practices of International Theory, New York, Routledge.

Di Grazia R. (1976), What’s wrong with America’s police leadership?, Police, May, Issue 24.

Edwards A and Gill P. (2003), Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security,

Routledge, New York.

Elvins M.(2003), Europe’s Response to Transnational Organized Crime, in Edwards A. and Gill P.

(eds), Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, Routledge, New York, pp.

28-41.

Enloe C. (2000), Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations,

Berkley, CA, and London, University of California Press.

105

European Commission (2005), Developing a strategic concept on tackling organized crime,

Communication from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament. Available at

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:52005DC0232:EN:NOT

European Union (1992), The Maastricht Treaty. Treaty on the European Union, Official Journal of the

European Union. Available at: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/11992M/htm/11992M.html

European Council (1999), Tampere European Council Presidential Conclusions, Bulletin EU No.

10/1999

European Council (2000), The Prevention and Control of Organized Crime: A European Union

Strategy for the Beginning of the New Millennium, Official Journal of the European Union.

Available at: http://eur-

lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2000:124:0001:0033:EN:PDF

European Council (2005a), The Hague Program: Strengthening Freedom, Security and Justice in the

European Union, Official Journal of the European Union. Available at:

http://www.csm.it/ENCJ/pdf/Action_Plan_Implementation_Hague_Prog.pdf

European Council (2005b), Living in an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, General Secretariat

DG-F Communication. Available at:

http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/librairie/PDF/PU2088_BROCH_JAI_EN.qxd.pd

f

European Council and Commission (1998), Action Plan of the Council and the Commission on how to

best implement the provisions of the Treaty of Amsterdam on an Area of Freedom, Security and

Justice. Available at: http://eur-

lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:1999:019:0001:0015:EN:PDF

European Parliament and European Council (2006), Schengen Borders Code, Official Journal of the

European Union. Available at: http://eur-

lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32006R0562:EN:NOT .

106

Finckenauer J. (2005), Problems of Definition: What is Organized Crime?, Trends in Organized

Crime, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 63-83.

Foucault M. (1980), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, London,

Harvester.

Foucault M. (1988), Practising Criticism, in Kritzman L.D. (eds), Politics, Philosophy, Culture:

Interviews and Other Writings of Michel Foucault, 1977-1984, London, Routledge, pp. 152-157.

George J. and Campbell D. (1990), Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical

Social Theory and International Relations, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 269-

293.

Godson R. and Olson W.J. (1995), International Organized Crime, Society, Vol. 32, No. 2 , pp.18-29.

Guild E. (2003), The border abroad: visas and border controls, in Groenendijk K. et al. (eds), In

Search of Europe’s Borders, The Hague, Kluwer Law International, pp. 87-104.

Hix S. and Hoyland B. (1999), The Political System of the European Union, Third Edition, New York,

Palgrave MacMillan.

Hobbs D. (1998), Going Down the Glocal: The Local Context of Organized Crime, The Howard

Journal, Vol.37, No.4, pp. 407-422.

Huysmans J. (2006), The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, New York,

Routledge.

Huysmans J. (1998), Security! What do you mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier, European

Journal of International Relations, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 226-255.

Justice and Home Affairs Council (2010), Internal Security Strategy for the European Union: Towards

a European Security Model, Publication Office of the European Union. Available at:

http://www.consilium.europa.eu/uedocs/cms_data/librairie/PDF/QC3010313ENC.pdf

Krause K. and Williams M.C. (1997), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London, UCL

Press.

107

Marx K. (1888), Thesis XI. Thesis on Feuerbach, The Marx/Engels Internet Archive, Available at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/1845/theses/theses.htm.

McSweeney B. (1996), Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School, Review of

International Studies, Vol. 22, pp. 81-93

Molina L. (2012), Genealogy: Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault, The California Undergraduate

Philosophy Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 55-67.

Mutimer D. et al. (2013), Critical Studies on Security: An Introduction, Critical Studies on Security,

Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-12.

Nadelmann E. (1993) Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law

Enforcement, Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania

Narcotics Control Digest, 19 March 1986.

Paoli L. (2002), The Paradoxes of Organized Crime, Crime, Law and Social Change, Vol. 37, pp. 51-

97.

Paoli L. (2008), Organized Crime: New Label, New Phenomenon or Policy Expedient?, International

Annals of Criminology, Vol. 46, Issue 1-2, pp. 37-60.

Peoples C. and Vaughan-Williams V. (2010), Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, New York,

Routledge.

Potter G.W. (1994), Criminal Organizations: Vice, Racketeering, and Politics in an American City,

Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Illinois.

President’s Commission on Organized Crime (1983,) Record of Hearing 1, Organized Crime: Federal

Law Enforcement Perspective, 29 November, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.

Raine L.P. and Cilluffo F.J. (1994), Global Organized Crime: The New Empire of Evil, Center for

Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC.

Reckwitz A. (2002), Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,

European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 243–63.

Reiner R. (2012), What’s Left? The prospects for social democratic criminology, Crime Media

Culture, Vol.8, No. 2, pp. 135-150.

Rotschild E. (1995), What is Security?, Daedalus, Vol.124, No.3, pp-53-98.

108

Scherrer A. (2009), G8 against Transnational Organized Crime, Ashgate Publishing Limited,

Farnham.

Shapiro M.J. (1989), Textualizing Global Politics, in Der Derian J. and Shapiro M.J. (eds),

International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics, New York, Lexington

Books.

Shelley LL. and Picarelli J. (2002), Method not Motives: Implication of the Convergence of

International Organized Crime and Terrorism, Police Practice and Research: An International

Journal, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 305-318.

Shepherd L. (2008), Gender, Violence and Security: Discourse as Practice, London and New York,

Zed Books.

Shepticky J. (1998), Policing, Postmodernism and Transnationalization, British Journal of

Criminology, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 485-503.

Sheptycki J. (2003a), Against Transnational Organized Crime, in Beare M. (eds.), Critical Reflections

on Transnational Crime, Money Laundering, and Corruption, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Shepticky J. (2003b), Global Law Enforcement as a Protection Racket: Some Skeptical Notes on

Transnational Organized Crime as a Object of Global Governance, in Edwards A. and Gill P.

(eds.), Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security, Routledge, New York, pp.

42-57.

Statewatch (1994), From Trevi to Maastricht: 68 Key Texts in Justice and Home Affair. Available at:

http://www.statewatch.org/semdoc/index.php?id=903 .

Steans, J. (1998), Gender and International Relations, Oxford, Polity Press.

Stohl M. (2008), Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism, Critical Studies

on Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 5-16.

Stritzel H. (2012), Securitization, power, intertextuality: Discourse theory and the translations of

organized crime, Security Dialogue, Vol. 43, pp. 549-567.

Taurek R. (2006), Securitization Theory and Securitization Studies, Journal of International Relations

and Development, Vol.9, pp.53-61.

109

Tickner A.J. (1992), Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global

Security, New York, Columbia University Press.

United Nations (1994a), Report of the World Ministerial Conference on Organized Transnational

Crime, General Assembly, 2 December 1994. Available at

http://www.imolin.org/imolin/naples.html

United Nations (1994b), Press Release, 21 November 1994. Statement by the Secretary-General on the

Occasion of the World Ministerial Conference on Organized Crime.

United Nations (1994c), Press Releases SOC/CP/134–5, 22 November 1994.

US Congress, Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (1951) Third

Interim Report. 82nd Congress, Washington, DC. Available at:

http://www.onewal.com/kef/kef3.html.

Van Dijck M. (2007), Discussing Definitions of Organized Crime: Word Play in Academic and

Political Discourse, HUMSEC Journal, Issue 1, Vol. 1, pp. 5-25.

Vaughan-Williams N. (2008), Borderwork Beyond Inside/Outside Frontex, the Citizen/Detective and

the War on Terror, Space and Polity, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 63-79.

Waever O. (1989), Security, The Speech Act: Analyzing the Politics of a Word, Research Training

Seminar, Center of Peace and Conflict Research, Sostrup Manor.

Waever O. (1998), Securitization and Desecuritization, in Lipschutz R. (eds), On Security, New York,

Columbia University Press.

Walt S. M.(1991), The Renaissance of Security Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Vol35, No.2,

pp. 211-239.

Weber M. (2004), The Vocation Lectures, (eds Owen D.), Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company.

Wyn Jones R. (1999), Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Woodiwiss M (2001), Organized Crime and American Power, University of Toronto Press Toronto.

Woodiwiss M. (2003), Transnational Organized Crime: The Global Reach of an American Concept, in

(eds.) Edwards A and Gill P., Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security,

Routledge, New York, pp. 13-27.

110