Scrutinizing the Transnational: Advocacy Networks, Criminal Organizations and State Authority

This week’s discussion about transnational advocacy networks gave me a great deal of pause in reflecting back to discussions from a previous module about transnational criminal organizations.  Specifically, we discussed how transnational criminal organizations challenge state power and also briefly discussed how transnational advocacy networks do so in kind.  With that said, how can we distinguish one from the other, particularly when dealing with advocacy networks that engage in criminal activity?

In their piece titled: “Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics”, Keck and Sikkink argue that these advocacy networks are important because they “multiply the channels of access to the international system” and are “bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services” (p. 2).  Couldn’t a similar argument be made for international criminal organizations, which also multiply access channels and have the capacity to share values and exchanges with nation-states or other criminal organizations? 

Keck and Sikkink go on to say that these advocacy groups “bridge the increasingly artificial divide between international and national realms” and “gain influence by serving as alternate sources of information” (pp. 4-9).  Could we not make a similar argument for organizations such as the Taliban and Hamas, which likewise bridge these artificial divides and provide information (and much more) to both its “citizens” and the greater international community at large?

We have established that both of these powers possess the ability to erode upon state power and authority, with both challenging its authority in different ways.  Transnational advocacy networks appear to challenge state authority by working across sovereign borders and hierarchies to streamline international exchange and to influence behaviors.  Transnational criminal organizations, on the other hand, appear to challenge state legitimacy, either by calling into question its ability to defend/control activities within its own borders or by soliciting doubt about the state’s ability to act within the confines of the established international order (i.e. a state government leveraging criminal organizations to supplement its own security forces).

Much like transnational advocacy groups, Phil Williams, in “Transnational Organized Crime and the State” puts forward that “although drug trafficking groups and other transnational criminal organizations represent both private power and private authority, they are not averse to appealing to more traditional state authority when the need presents itself” (p. 166).  That is to say that like transnational advocacy groups, criminal organizations can borrow state legitimacy and leverage it to their own advantage.  One example would be criminal organizations using borders as a means to avoid being pursued and arrested for their crimes or by leveraging laws in one state against those of another and manipulating gray areas to protect their interests/activities.

Ultimately, both transnational criminal organizations and transnational advocacy networks serve to erode upon state authority and relevance.  That said, the differences between the two are not as substantial as at first they appear.  Both lack any formal “legitimacy” within the international system and both will borrow state legitimacy when it suits them.  

Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders (Cornell, 1998)

Phil Williams, “Transnational Organized Crime and the State,” in The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance, ed. Tom Biersteker and Rodney Bruce Hall (Cambridge, 2002)