Caught up in the Madness? State Power and Transnational Organized Crime in the Work of Susan Strange

Abstract

Susan Strange left an impressive legacy of scholarship on international relations.1 She consistently challenged the field for its tendency to privilege the state and discount the role of markets and transnational actors. For Strange, power was contested by states and nonstate actors, and bargaining between these actors in the context of transnational relations remained a central theme in her work. In two of her last major books - The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, and Mad Money* - Strange extended her approach to the challenges to state power posed by transnational organized crime. In many ways, this extension was a professional risk. Transnational crime lies on the fringes of international relations (IR) scholarship and is often seen as too journalistic, as an issue plagued by the absence of reliable data, and even as too dangerous for the researcher to pursue. Strange's work in this context helped to legitimize scholarly inquiry on transnational crime. However, Strange's overreliance on the very field she sought to challenge limits the insights of her approach. The problems are at least twofold and center on questions of theory and threat. On questions of theory, Strange chastises the field of IR for the problematic concepts and assumptions of its state-centric approach. Nonetheless, she runs into similar pitfalls by drawing on elements of this approach to explain the nature and influence of nonstate actors. On questions of threat, Strange chastises the state-centric approach for failing to capture the erosion of state authority in the face of transnational crime. Nonetheless, she largely accepts as given the arguments of state actors concerning the nature and extent of this erosion. By failing to explore the extent to which