Illicit Trade and Smuggling

Abstract

In this article, illicit trade and smuggling refer to the unauthorized sale, purchase, exchange, or transport of goods, persons, animals, or technology across borders. Illicit trade across borders may entail goods considered dangerous, those that circumvent prohibitions in one or both countries, or mundane items and population movements that evade controls or regulations. However, smuggled goods may be produced, consumed, or recirculated legally, informally, or illegally. Lacking a universal, global set of norms and regulations across time, much of what is considered to be illicit trade may be legal in one place while prohibited in another, or tolerated in one time and banned in another. The forms smuggling takes and its profitability are shaped by regulations, their inconsistent application, and their differences across different regulatory spheres. Illicit trade often dovetails with legal global trade; forms of integration from below may proceed alongside, compete with, resist, or even complement and foster legal global economic flows. Power relations, within countries and wielded by more powerful nations with influence to shape trade agreements, trade policies, financial norms, and global prohibition regimes, normalize the kinds of international trade considered legal and beneficial and foster the criminalization of competing alternatives. Yet, such norms are not necessarily widely shared or consistently applied and implemented. Individuals engaging in forms of illicit trade and smuggling may not share the perspective of states or international organizations regarding the morality and legitimacy of their actions. Scholars contend that perceptions of illicit trade risk perpetuating seeing like a state, making historical and comparative perspectives paramount. Not everything the state does is moral and not every aspect of illicit trade is amoral. This may pertain especially with respect to the marginalized; extra-legal trade may provide a mode of subsistence, and state regulations may be experienced as selective, predatory, and protective of elite privilege and prevailing arrangements of inequality. States have the power to determine what is legal or criminal in the first place. Yet critical perspectives also point to how states and elite actors may benefit not only from forms of corruption, but also from illicit trade more broadly such that illicit trade is constitutive of state power, bureaucratic expansion, and international norms. Debate persists regarding whether illicit markets stabilize, build, compete with, or destabilize governance arrangements. Scholars also disagree whether illicit trade has grown, facilitated by globalization, or whether perceptions of this rising threat are shaped more by questionable numbers, state/private interests, and changing prohibitions.