Abstract: Introduction THIS ARTICLE FOCUSES ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND NATIONAL SECURITY MEASURES linked to transnational crime, with a specific focus on terrorism legislation and measures in the context of the war on terror. Though transnational crime such as global terrorism is conventionally understood to trigger state responses, this article reverses that common-sense assumption. It foregrounds the and suggests that the construction of a transnational crime threat provides a productive fiction, establishing a rhetorical platform for the transformation and extension of the coercive capacities of states. Changes in state coercive capacities have occurred incrementally in the three decades preceding 2001, but escalated markedly after the September 2001 attacks on the United States. Critiques of transnational crime responses tend to focus on their ineffectiveness or costs. For example, Margaret Beare's (2003: xi) introduction to an edition of critical reflections on transnational crime advises that the collection most plainly asks the reader to judge what cost the various enforcement strategies are being applied. A focus on costs is useful for describing and understanding the negative impacts of countermeasures. It cannot, however, explain the resilience of the countermeasures in the face of evidence, often overwhelming, of their failure. While acknowledging that countermeasures are ineffective, often counterproductive, and costly both in human and financial terms, this article focuses instead on the ways that notions of transnational crime, particularly terrorism, have successfully developed, maintained, and extended social, political, and economic hierarchies between and within states. This essay looks not at what the countermeasures cost, but at what or who benefits from them. Transnational Crime and the Border Transnational crime necessarily implicates a border between national states (Reichel, 2005: xiii-xv). The border breach that is part and parcel of transnational crime conceptually mirrors the blurring and blending of the borders between the functions of the police and military. In liberal democracies such as Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the national border has served as a dividing line between the police and military functions. Traditionally, the former has been associated with internal issues of crime and disorder and the latter with defense against external enemies (McCulloch, 2001; Hocking, 2003). The increase in concern over transnational crime in the past 30 years and the parallel rise in countermeasures has involved an incremental and progressive blending of military and policing functions. This blurring has not been subject to the sustained criminological attention it deserves. This is partly because the blurring of the internal and external functions of the state challenges disciplinary boundaries. Criminology has traditionally been concerned with projections of state power within borders through the operations of law enforcement and internal criminal justice systems. In contrast, international relations and security studies have been concerned with the external projections of state power in the form of overlapping issues of national security, foreign policy, and military operations and threats. Despite the progressive and now well-established border breach between the two spheres, there is a tendency within criminology to think in terms of either national security or criminal justice. Writing about the contemporary response to terrorism in a chapter published in 2005, Jonathan White asks whether terrorism should handled by the criminal justice system or should it be considered with the framework of national security? He states further that many countries, including the United States, have yet to answer this question (White, 2005: 68). This is not accurate. The response from the United States and other countries, like Australia, is loud and clear and it is not either-or but an increasingly indistinguishable and intermeshed combination of both. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-06-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 21
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