Traffick

Gargi Bhattacharyya

Description

This book explores the underbelly of globalisation - the illicit networks of money, drugs, people and arms that make up a multi-billion dollar illegal economy.



This is the dangerous world of trafficking, identified by developed countries as the major threat to international order. In their eyes, it brings unwanted and undocumented people into the hidden crevices of affluent societies; guns and drugs are exchanged for access to the global market through the backdoor. As a result, trafficking is scrutinised, vilified, outlawed, even as free trade is celebrated.



Gargi Bhattacharyya argues that trafficking is the unacknowledged underside of globalisation. The official economy relies on this illegal economy. Without it, globalisation cannot access cheap labour, it cannot reach vulnerable new markets, and it cannot finance expansion into the places most ravaged by human suffering. Traffick has become the secret basis of global expansion.
1. How did we get here?

2. Underbelly of the global

3. Winning the Cold War – The power of organised crime in the global economy

4. Drugs, territory and transnational networks

5. Nuclear holocaust or drive-by shooting? Arms in the new world economy

6. Circulating bodies in the global marketplace

7. Conclusion: Violent endings and new beginnings

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Emigration
• Criminology
• Migration
• Immigration

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2005
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781849641937
• Langue: English

Extrait

Traffick The Illicit Movement of People and Things

Gargi Bhattacharyya

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2005 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Gargi Bhattacharyya 2005

The right of Gargi Bhattacharyya to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN ISBN

0 7453 2048 1 hardback 0 7453 2047 3 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

10

9

8

7

6

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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

Acknowledgements

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1 How Did We Get Here?

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2 Underbelly of the Global

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3 Winning the Cold War: The Power of Organised Crime in the Global Economy

4 Drugs, Territory and Transnational Networks

5 Nuclear Holocaust or Driveby Shooting? Arms in the New World Economy

6 Circulating Bodies in the Global Marketplace

Conclusion: Violent Endings and New Beginnings

Bibliography Index

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197 214

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Writing books can be a painful business – by the time you are able to piece together the narrative, you are all too aware of how little you know. At the same time, getting to write as part of my job can feel like a privilege, particularly when the world is so troubling. The last few years have been distressing times for many of us, so I have been pleased to have this chance to have a think about things. While writing this, I benefited from discussions with colleagues and students at the universities of Jadavpur and Dhaka. I thank both institutions for their hospitality. Thanks also go to everyone at Pluto Press, for their encouragement and patience throughout this project. As always, I am indebted to a whole host of people. Especial thanks go to my students at the University of Birmingham, with whom I first discussed many of these ideas; to Matt Waddup, who won’t remember, for a conversation about the left’s addiction to conspiracy theories that is in the background of much of this work; to Khademul Haque for our discussions of the impact of globalisation on various parts of the developing world; to Stanheed Butt for our ongoing debate about global events and local political choices; to Manju who reminded me that the moment when the powerful are most insistent about asserting their absolute power may be the moment when that power is crumbling; to Sonali for all of our shared horror at what has been happening around us and our discussions about how this could be explained and linked to other recent events; and, most of all, to Dilip who kindly and diligently read the draft of this work, despite his antipathy to extended prose. I hope you feel like I finally learned something worth knowing.

vi

1 How Did We Get Here?

When I rst started to plan this project, in the summer of 2001, few people I met seemed to agree with my suggestion that we were living through a stepchange in the rhythm of globalisation. I wasnt yet condent about the parameters of the book, and the account I could give of the tangled interconnections between the trades in arms, drugs and people seemed as old as human trade itself. Nothing new in that seedy world, certainly no sign of a new phase of globalised relations. Then, from September 2001, everyone started to talk about the need to regulate global movements, of the dangers of untraceable transnational transactions, of the urgent need to put a break on globalisation. It has since been hard to escape the suggestion, made by all kinds of people in a whole range of places, that we are in a new era where we must learn to regulate and contain the excesses of our insistently interdependent world (for some examples see Amin, 2003; Brennan, 2003; Mertes, 2004). We may not have agreed a method for doing this, or a membership for this imagined regulatory body, or even an ultimate goal  but that rst shift in consciousness, the one that says that there are dangers in leaving global processes to regulate themselves, has hit home hard. What follows is an account of how we come to this place.

Sometimes, when reading famous attempts to narrativise the tumultuous events of the nineteenth century that seek to register what it felt like to be alive in this best and worst of times, I have wondered what it must have been like to live through these worldchanging processes without any sense of where things are going or how they might end. We presentday readers approach these documents  the novels and the political treaties, the famous essays, the diaries, the amateur investigations that form the basis of social science as we know it  with the lazy seenitallbefore of our hindsight. We have no doubts about how it ends. Of course, it ends with us. The massive social changes that swept across Europe in the nineteenth century seem to us to be no more than the building blocks of our everyday reality. The transitions to becoming urban, industrial, literate, governed by the state, internationally networked

1

2 Traffick

and nationally identied  all of these cataclysmic changes now represent no more than the most tedious and predictable components of contemporary life in the West. For the contemporary reader, it is hard to imagine that the world has ever been anything otherwise. But something is lost in that easy acceptance of what is. Certainly, our imaginative grasp of the process of change is dampened by an unwillingness to consider that things could have been different, and, by all accounts, once were so. How can we understand epochal change unless we have some way to access that breathless uncertainty, the mixture of fear and anticipation, the jitters and rejiggings that come from things being as yet undecided? This work argues that we are all living through some wondrous and horric world changes  and that attempts at understanding what is happening must make space for both the wonder and the horror of our times. When I rst read Marshall Bermans groundbreaking account of cultural change,All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, I was struck by the sense of high excitement that pervaded this study of the cultures of modernity. Although this cultural production emerges from the most turbulent times, and runs parallel to immense and intense barbarism, there is something important about acknowledging that sense of excitement. Most of all, I took that elation as a sign that things were not yet decided. Berman himself writes in this vein of the modern voice:

It is a voice that knows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come through. Grave danger is everywhere, and may strike at any moment, but not even the deepest wounds can stop the ow and overow of its energy. It is ironic and contradictory, polyphonic and dialectical, denouncing modern life in the name of values that modernity itself has created, hoping  often against hope  that the modernities of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow will heal the wounds that wreck the modern men and women of today. (Berman, 1982, 1988, 23)

That heightened sense of simultaneous possibility and danger is Bermans chosen subject. His argument that modernity, in all the many varied processes that this term includes, at once renders us hopelessly broken and endlessly powerful, always torn between mourning what has been lost and welcoming what could be, embodies the doubleness of modern experience. The suggestion that all that is solid melts into air is both a threat and a promise. Everything known and certain in the world, the good, the bad and the indifferent, drifts

How Did We Get Here? 3

away leaving us without any of the comfort of knowing where we are or of being at home. Yet that uncanny sense of rootlessness also promises that the shape of the world and our destiny in it are yet to be written. Anything can happen and there is no way of knowing whether that anything will be good or bad  only that our modern consciousness tells us that it is ours to shape:

To be modern is to nd ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world  and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. (Berman, 1982, 1988, 15)

We are now passing through a time of similarly tumultuous change. I am not making a case here for the end of modernity, and neither is this a belated addition to the fractious debates about postmodernity (see for example Bauman, 1997; Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 1992). Rather, the parallel I wish to draw is with that feeling of living through huge and unpredictable change. Perhaps this is an extension of the same long process, with all that is solid still melting into air. It is certainly arguable that the multiple processes that are gathered together as globalisation represent a continuation of the seemingly endless renement of modernity. That long discussion is beyond the scope of this project. Instead, my interest is in our ability to register and understand these changes as we live through them. I hope that what follows goes some way towards registering this moment, and offering some clues towards its understanding, while recognising that its end is not yet decided. Inevitably, this work shows the inuence of the anticapitalist movement, and especially of the intellectual renaissance that has emerged in resistance to globalisation (Gills, 2000; Klein, 2000; Mertes, 2004). However, the present study is not quite in the tradition of these anticorporate critiques. There is a resonance with this other work, and some points of political agreement, but my primary goal here is to construct a framework for understanding. There is something uncomfortable about identifying your enemies too easily and too quickly. The teacher in me is concerned that we register the complexity of the situation, even as we line up in our respective teams. In the end, I want to argue that understanding needs to be, in part at least, distinct from political allegiance, although I hope that there will also be some informative relation between the two.

4 Traffick

The other characteristic that distinguishes this work from much other related literature is my wish to register something of the excitement of the globalising process. The chapters that follow focus on various extremes of human hardship and danger. The underbelly of globalism is not a pretty thing, except in the terms of the exploitative antiglamour that gets off on death and suffering. But there is something missing from any account of the global integration of the shadows that does not make space for the sense of adventure and possibility that is also apparent. For this reason the discussion to come tries to register both the horror and the elation of what we are living through.

CHAOS AND ORDER

The strange and exciting processes of globalisation can be characterised as an ongoing and irresolvable battle between forces of chaos and forces of order. Of course, the discussion of globalisation has more often concentrated on the apparently chaotic aspects of this era. So we learn, with some sense of relief, that the era of increasing global integration decentres us all. No more master subjects of empire, now even the rich and powerful have become vulnerable to forces beyond their control (Sardar, 1998). This is the account of globalisation as accidental. Here the economy grows in unexpected and unplanned ways and we have no choice but to live with the consequences of this cultural earthquake. Here globalisation has not been subject to planning or conscious development by any party; it is portrayed as an antihuman force, resistant to control or intervention. In this telling, the various attempts by human beings to cooperate at an international level  be this in terms of political agreement or economic contract  come to be seen as the antithesis of globalisation. Against this, I shall argue that the globalisation we encounter today is a product of earlier and ongoing international aspirations. The chaos has been a byproduct of one style of ordering. In fact, the chaos ensures that the order can be maintained. Many of the debates about globalisation have seemed to assume that it is akin to a natural disaster, a strange event that happens to us and which we can only hope to survive. Although some brave souls have attempted to suggest that perhaps these happenings are not inevitable, the notion that globalisation could be halted or turned back has been ridiculed as unrealistic and Luddite.

How Did We Get Here? 5

My interest is not in halting or reversing these processes. Whatever the many and extreme deprivations that have resulted from movements within the global economy, it is not the case that the poor were better served by what happened before this. There is no state of grace to which we can return, as usual. Instead, along with many others, my interest is more in the possibility of adapting and reshaping globalisation in order that it might better meet the needs of ordinary people all over the world. This is one of those pesky lessons of modernity  any better tomorrow must come out of the debris of today. However, the main focus of this book is the notion that the global structures we inhabit have not emerged spontaneously, inevitably, and without historical context. In fact, others have argued quite the contrary, namely, that globalisation represents a plan for world domination. Mark Rupert, for instance, argues that the whole debate about globalisation and its emergence has been conducted in deeply ideological terms that mask the political project of a particular neo liberal vision of global integration:

There is no reason to believe that liberal globalization is ineluctable. Contrary to much of the evolutionary imagery or technological determinism which is often invoked to explain it  globalization has been neither spontaneous norinevitable;ithasbeenthepoliticalprojectofanidentiableconstellation of dominant social forces and it has been, and continues to be, politically problematic and contestable. (Rupert, 2000, 42)

While I agree with some aspects of this account, in that the formal institutions and processes of economic integration have been part of an explicit plan instigated by a selfproclaimed interest group, the implication that the multilayered processes of globalisation can be explained away as a conspiracy by the powerful is problematic, to say the least. Technology may not be determining, but technology has played an important role in shaping the manner of global integration. It may be true that the metaphor of an unstoppable evolution has formed part of the propaganda of neoliberalism, but global integration has been shaped by more complex and contradictory forces than this embodiment of capitalist will. Even if the powerful have a plan, history will always complicate its implementation. We have been living through a time when the forces of globalisation have seemed to belong exclusively to the rich and powerful. As the world changes, it can feel as if ordinary people everywhere have

6 Traffick

no choice but to suffer  there is little sense that we can shape the new day that is arriving: that privilege belongs to someone else. Yet even the unstoppable juggernaut of globalisation can be rattled by unplanned complications. In particular, recent rumblings from international institutions have suggested that there exists a criminal and illegitimate set of global networks that threatens to destabilise the more celebrated transactions of the global economy proper. It is this parallel world that forms the focus for this volume. In the discussion that follows, I want to return to some old and seemingly forgotten arguments.

AN EDUCATION IN CURRENT AFFAIRS

When I began thinking about this book I wanted to pull together a number of key debates, and to provide some kind of route map for the complex suggestions coming from different disciplinary elds. In this sense, then, while I am entering these debates very much as an amateur, my hope is that a crossdisciplinary approach may open up connections and insights to a wider audience. As a teacher, I have found that students are highly engaged with debates about the nature of globalisation and its impact on our everyday lives, and are eager to think about the emerging political context and challenges that are facing us all. However, much of the material that discusses the emergence of contemporary globalisation remains somewhat remote from their concerns. In my most recent courses I have found that students share my concern to understand contemporary events as they unfold before us. This desire to develop some critical insight into the confusion of recent happenings, most especially when what happens is so very frightening, has been shared by my students and myself. As a result, this work has been motivated by a strong belief that education can help you to understand your world, however quickly that world may be changing and however alarming those changes may be. I also think that these turbulent times offer excitement as well as alarm, and that the adventure of social change is a story well worth telling. What follows, then, is an attempt to pull together some disparate threads in the bloodcurdling but eventful adventure tale of recent global events. There has been a strange tension in many spheres of social science discussion in recent years  good sense tells us that there are no sustainable metanarratives, just broad conceptual frameworks that must be lled with local detail to bring any insight;