Part IV Activities of Organizations, Ch.10 Counterterrorism and Transnational Crime

Subject(s):

Organized crime — Terrorism — Collective security — Membership of international organizations — Resolutions of international organizations — International organizations, practice and procedure

Economic globalization has facilitated transnational criminal and terrorist activity since the mid-nineteenth century, thus incentivizing closer international law enforcement cooperation. This chapter explores the history of that cooperation, the contours of which are shaped by the interaction of the institutions of sovereignty and the reality of power in the international system. It argues that international law enforcement cooperation to counter terrorism and transnational crime takes two independent, but interacting, forms: firstly, the use of existing international institutions to define behaviour as criminally deviant and to repress it, even against the will of some states; and, secondly, the formation of transgovernmental policing networks, and, more recently, collaborative multisectoral governance arrangements — both notionally apolitical, but inherently reflective of a shared understanding of criminally deviant behaviour. The interplay of these two approaches follows the contours defined by juridical sovereignty and power in the international system.