Crime and error: a new approach to illicit trafficking in fragile states

This brief seeks to explain the fundamental errors and misconceptions which ensure that the fight against transnational organized crime, while scoring ever more arrests and interdictions, has failed to make headway against trafficking through some of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world. Murder rates remain stubbornly high along the cocaine highways of Central America, West African crime expands unabated, and in Central Asia, the trade route for heroin from Afghanistan remains under the control of armed groups and opaque political interests.

Although progress has been made in understanding how security and justice systems work, Western donors still need to confront the endemic weaknesses of institution-building, the extraordinary allure of the global criminal economy, and the ways that politicians and business systematically collude with traffickers. The brief concludes by listing a series of new policy areas that could underpin a new approach. Above all, these emphasize reducing the receptivity of fragile states to criminal enterprise, staunching violence, and ensuring the gradual build-up of trust, probity and clean business.