Drugs, Thugs and Terrorists

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course will examine transnational illicit markets and violent non-state actors, exploring how outlawed networks and illegal supply chains have evolved since Colonial times until today. Looking through the lens of international relations, international political economy, and criminology, the course will examine the intersection of crime and conflict, exploring how non-state armed actors from Japan, China, and Sicily eventually morphed into transnational organized crime groups (the Yakuza, the Triads, and the Cosa Nostra). We will also examine more recent case studies, such as how drug-funded insurgencies in places like Afghanistan and Colombia have prolonged wars, hollowed out state capacity at the local, national, and even regional level, and spoiled peace-building efforts, contributing to regional and even global fragility of multinational institutions. We will map the trajectories that non-state armed groups tend to follow once they become involved in drugs and other organized crime, using the IRA, the Pakistani Taliban and the Tamil Tigers as case studies. We will also investigate how organized crime groups come to resemble terrorist and insurgent networks, looking at contemporary Mexico and Brazil for examples. We will review state and multinational interventions to combat these problems, evaluating which interventions appear most impactful at each stage of these trajectories, and also examining why so many interventions fail spectacularly. Finally, in our last session, we will probe how the Digital Age has amplified the capacity for illicit actors to target victims, organize illicit campaigns, raise and launder funds, recruit, and market illegal products, and we will examine the many ways cyberspace -- and the laws governing the Internet -- upends centuries of norms for countering illicit groups.