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When Politicians Sell Drugs: Examining Why Middle East Ethnopolitical Organizations Are Involved in the Drug Trade

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09546553.2011.637588

1556-1836

Victor Asal, Kathleen Deloughery, Brian J. Phillips,

Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance

Abstract Political organizations claim they are serving the interests of their constituents—but being involved in the drug trade does not seem to support those claims. Why would political organizations sell drugs then? Most often the question of why organizations engage in the drug trade has been explored in the context of organizations that are either criminal or violent, thus leaving a large hole in the literature about how violence and legality intersect with other exploratory factors. We explore this issue more fully by looking at both violent and nonviolent organizations using the Middle East Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior dataset, which has data on over 100 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East. Very few of these organizations are involved in the drug trade and yet all of those are engaged in violence at the same time. We explore what factors, other than violence, make this rare behavior for political organizations more likely. Keywords: crimedrugsethnic conflictreligionstate violence Acknowledgments This material is based upon work supported by the Science and Technology directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under grant award numbers N00140510629 and 2008-ST-061-ST0004, made to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START, www.start.umd.edu). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or START. Notes Louise I. Shelley and John T. Picarelli, “Methods Not Motives: Implications of The Convergence of International Organized Crime and Terrorism,” Police Practice and Research 3, no. 4 (2002): 305–318. R. T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 70. There are studies of why criminal organizations sell drugs, but since our focus is on political groups, these are substantially different. See for example Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) and Brenda C. Coughlin and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, “The Urban Street Gang after 1970,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 41–65. Research on the crime-terror nexus and civil war funding is discussed below. For example, Chris Dishman, “Terrorism, Crime, and Transformation,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 24, no. 1 (2001): 43–58; Tamara Makarenko, “The Crime-Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay Between Organised Crime and Terrorism,” Global Crime 6, no. 1 (2004): 129–145; Shelley and Picarelli (see note 1 above); Alex P. Schmid, “Drug Trafficking, Transnational Crime, and International Terrorist Groups,” in Organized Crime: From Trafficking to Terrorism, ed. Frank G. Shanty (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO, 2007), 342–345; Phil Williams, “Illicit Markets, Weak States, and Violence: Iraq and Mexico,” Crime Law and Social Change 52, no. 3 (2009): 323–336. On differences between studying crime and studying terrorism see Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan, “How Does Studying Terrorism Compare to Studying Crime?,” in Criminology and Terrorism, ed. Mathieu DeFlem (Oxford: Elsevier, 2004), 53–74. Matthew Levitt, “Hezbollah: Financing Terror Through Criminal Enterprise,” Testimony before U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (May 25, 2005), http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/testimony/313.pdf. Paul Collier, “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44, no. 6 (2000): 839–853; Phillipe Le Billon, “The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts,” Political Geography 20, no. 5 (2001): 561–584. Michael L. Ross “What Do We Know About Natural Resources and Civil War?,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (2004): 337–356; Michael L. Ross, “How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases,” International Organization 58, no. 1 (2004): 35–67; Svante E. Cornell, “The Interaction of Narcotics and Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research 42, no. 6 (2005): 751–760. James D. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer than Others?” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (2004): 271–301; Naylor (see note 2 above), 72. Gambetta (see note 3 above), 234–244. Mark S. Gaylord and Harold Traver, “Introduction,” in Drugs, Law, and the State, ed. Gaylord and Traver (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1992), 6; Shane Blackman, Chilling Out (New York: Open University Press, 2004), 45. Andrew F. Sunter, “The Harm of Drug Trafficking: Is There Room for Serious Debate?,” Manitoba Law Journal 32 (2007): 174–212 (quotes are on pp. 175 and 176, respectively). For example, see Stuart Horsman, “Themes in Official Discourses on Terrorism in Central Asia,” Third World Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2005): 199–213. Dishman (see note 4 above), 46. John Kane, The Politics of Moral Capital (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. Gonzalo A. Vargas, “Drugs, Hearts and Minds: Irregular War and the Coca Economy in South Bolivar, Colombia (1996–2004),” Civil Wars 13, no. 1 (2011): 21–39. Kane (see note 14 above), 14. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economic Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563–595. For example, see Matthew A. Levitt, “The Political Economy of Middle Eastern Terrorism,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 6, no. 4 (2002): 49–65. Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage (New York: Free Press, 1985). Mia A. Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). See also Kim Cragin, Peter Chalk, Sara A. Daley, and Brian A. Jackson, Sharing the Dragon's Teeth: Terrorist Groups and the Exchange of New Technologies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2007). Gregory F. Treverton, Carl Matthies, Karla J. Cunningham, Jeremiah Goulka, Greg Ridgeway, and Anny Wong, Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009). Thomas M. Sanderson, “Transnational Terror and Organized Crime: Blurring the Lines,” SAIS Review 24, no. 1 (2004): 49–61. For example, see John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001). Phil Williams, “Transnational Criminal Networks,” in Arquilla and Ronfeldt (see note 23 above), 61–97; see 71–72. See Levitt (note 5 above), 10. See Williams (note 24 above), 72. Letizia Paoli, “The Paradoxes of Organized Crime,” Crime, Law and Social Change 37, no. 1 (2002): 51–97. See Shelley and Picarelli (note 1 above), 308. Letizia Paoli and Peter Reuter, “Drug Trafficking and Ethnic Minorities in Western Europe,” European Journal of Criminology 5 (January 2008): 13–37, 24. See Paoli and Reuter (ibid.), 13, 25. Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Diaspora and Drug Trafficking in West Africa: A Case Study of Ghana,” African Affairs 104, no. 416 (2005): 429–447. Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). See Kane (note 14 above), 14. See Juergensmeyer (note 32 above), 149. See Sunter (see note 11 above), Horsman (see note 12 above), and Vargas (see note 15 above). This has clearly not deterred the Taliban from drug involvement, but it is one of many religious-based groups. See Lowry Taylor, The Nexus of Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in the Golden Crescent: Afghanistan (Master's Thesis, U.S. Army War College, 2006). For example, see Travis Hirschi, Causes of Delinquency (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2002). Gary R. Weaver and Bradley R. Agle, “Religiosity and Ethical Behavior in Organizations: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective,” Academy of Management Review 27, no. 1 (2002): 77–97. Michael R. Welch, Charles R. Tittle, and Harold G. Grasmick, “Christian Religiosity, Self-Control, and Social Conformity,” Social Forces 84, no. 3 (2006): 1605–1623. Stephen J. Bahr, Suzanne L. Maughan, Anastasios C. Marcos, and Bingdao Li, “Family, Religiosity, and the Risk of Adolescent Drug Use,” Journal of Family and Marriage 60, no. 4 (1998): 979–992; Rick Linden and Raymond Currie, “Religiosity and Drug Use: A Test of Social Control Theory,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Corrections 19 (1977): 346–355; Michael D. Newcomb, Ebrahim Maddahian, and P. M. Bentler, “Risk Factors for Drug Use Among Adolescents: Concurrent and Longitudinal Analyses,” American Journal of Public Health 76, no. 5 (1986): 525–531. Civil wars can be classified by whether the substate actor aims to capture the state center or capture a segment of territory. Either type of civil war directly challenges the authority of the state. Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978). See for example Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970) and Patrick M. Regan and Daniel Norton, “Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 49, no. 3 (2005): 319–336. Louise Richardson, “Britain and the IRA,” in Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons From the Past, ed. Robert J. Art and Louise Richardson (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2007), 69. We are agnostic regarding the temporality between state violence and rejection of state authority. Furthermore, states do not only attack groups that have rejected their authority, and not all groups attacked by the state respond by rejecting its authority. Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Data and Codebook Version 9/2008 online: http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/mar/data.asp Ibid. Gary King and Lanche Zeng, “Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data,” Political Analysis 9, no. 2 (2001): 137–163. Victor Asal and Karl R. Rethemeyer, “The Nature of the Beast: Organizational Structures and the Lethality of Terrorist Attacks,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 2 (2008): 437–449; Juergensmeyer (note 32 above); and Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 88. Additional informationNotes on contributorsVictor Asal Victor Asal is a professor in the Department of Political Science, Nelson A. Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy, University at Albany. Kathleen Deloughery Kathleen Deloughery is a professor in the Department of Public Administration, University at Albany. Brian J. Phillips Brian J. Phillips is an assistant professor in the Division of International Studies, Center for Research and Teaching Economics (CIDE).