Geographies of the illicit

Abstract

The paper notes a growing, diverse and yet somewhat partial and disparate interest among geographers in the illicit. Within this there has been little substantive interest in organized criminality despite it constituting a range of activities comparable in their significance to other aspects of the illicit that have attracted extensive attention from geographers. This paper argues that the development of a geographical perspective on organized crime is timely and seeks to map out connections with both the extant literatures of organized crime and those of human geography.

Towards a cultural political economy of the illicit

“…An important group of publications that discuss ideas on the illicit is research on criminal organizations. A prominent voice in this literature is one of Tim Hall, who has articulated the interdisciplinary scholarship on the subject through a political economy perspective (Hall, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2018). While criminal and illicit economies are not always the same, many overlaps exist between the two (Pinheiro-Machado, 2018).…”

“…For example, he notes that in some countries criminal organizations are de facto licit actors and ‘have recognized or accepted roles in the mediation of business and civil disputes or in the provision of goods and services’ (2010: 843), making it difficult to study these economic actors through the legal/illegal binary. According to Hall (2012), while a vast multidisciplinary scholarship beyond our discipline has produced valuable ethnographic accounts of criminal activities in particular regions, geographers are better positioned to examine their multiscalar dimensions. He has thus advocated for research that brings together the elements of different organizations, regulations and flows as a way to capture the complex spatial and organizational dynamics of criminality across scales; and for a rethink of conventional accounts of the global economy and its actors (Hall, 2012).…”

“…According to Hall (2012), while a vast multidisciplinary scholarship beyond our discipline has produced valuable ethnographic accounts of criminal activities in particular regions, geographers are better positioned to examine their multiscalar dimensions. He has thus advocated for research that brings together the elements of different organizations, regulations and flows as a way to capture the complex spatial and organizational dynamics of criminality across scales; and for a rethink of conventional accounts of the global economy and its actors (Hall, 2012).…”

“…While literature on diverse economies has shown how capitalist processes are articulated in a variety of economic activities, also pertaining to the multiple space-times of the informal and the illicit (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Smith and Stenning, 2006), scholarship on disarticulation has highlighted the way violence underpins mechanisms of value production and accumulation (Alford et al, 2019; Bair and Werner, 2011; McGrath, 2018; Werner, 2018). By now, illicit activities are recognized to be inherently connected to capitalist dynamics (Hudson, 2018), to play a central role in geographical processes (Hall, 2012) and to participate in the uneven development of cities and regions (Chiodelli et al, 2018). Political economy has been the dominant paradigm of this scattered subfield, providing key contributions that raised broader questions on the relationship between the illicit and the dynamics of capitalism.…”

Comparative Analysis of Illicit Supply Network Structure and Operations: Cocaine, Wildlife, and Sand

“…Despite the documented scope of ISN economic activities and associated harms, efforts to understand and disrupt ISNs remain insufficient due to the persistent lack of knowledge connecting a given ISN's modus operandi and its patterns of activity in space and time (Hall 2013;Hudson 2014;Nellemann et al 2016). Like other illicit activities, the clandestine nature of environmental crimes poses difficulties for monitoring and research, and data about illicit flows, actors, and locations are inherently incomplete (Banister, Boyce & Slack 2015;Siriwat & Nijman 2018).…”