Illicit Economy Research Articles

‘They don’t even teach you how to make money!’ What insights can marginalised young people provide into developing inclusive education policy?

Using data from a qualitative study exploring the intersections of school exclusion, mental health, and involvement in criminal behaviour, we explore young people’s experience of schools to inform consideration of how schools might be modified to help improve mental health and engagement, and take a more proactive role in safeguarding young people from contextual risks. We draw on sociological theories considering how inequity and disadvantage may be reproduced. Poor experiences of school create disengagement, perpetuate deep structural inequalities, and can act as a motivating force to gain status and money through the illicit economy. Broadening the focus in schools, away from the narrow pursuit of academia, to include more group-based and project-based learning; placing greater priority on life skills and vocational training; and focussing more on developing a sense of belonging through sports and arts may benefit all students, particularly those most at risk of exclusion. If the education system is to build stronger engagement with the most marginalised students, it must actively support them to achieve their priority to find (legitimate) means of earning money.

Playing with Fire: How Engagement with Illicit Economies Shapes the Survival and Resilience of Ethnic Armed Organisations in the China-Myanmar Borderlands

This article examines the relationship between the survival and resilience of ethnic armed organisations (EAOs) and their involvement in the illicit economy in the China-Myanmar borderlands of northern Shan State over time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 2018 to 2022 in both the China-Myanmar and Thai-Myanmar borderlands, it employs a spatiotemporal approach to explore the interactions among border openness/closure, transnational flows, EAO’s strategies, and illicit economies, including the Cold War era drug trade, the gambling industry in the early twenty-first century, and the post-Covid-19 online scams industry. The study reveals how EAOs use the border as a resource, adapting their strategies to changing political environments. It argues that these interactions are not linear but rather characterised by reciprocal influences across various historical periods. This historical overview of the interactions between non-state armed groups and illicit economies reveals the complexity of the contested borderland along the Chinese border.

Gangs and the Gig Economy: Triads, Precarity and Illicit Work in Hong Kong

Abstract Paid employment in the criminal economy is, in many ways, the essence of precarious labour yet to date criminological work on the so-called ‘gig economy’ is scarce. Here we apply emergent sociological literature on ‘post-Fordist’ working cultures to precarious youth employment in Hong Kong, arguing: (1) recent reorganizations of labour markets towards flexible entrepreneurship are mirrored in the illicit economy; (2) a shift in structural features of triad gangs has led to a parallel form of ‘network sociality’; and (3) triad-affiliated youth remained rooted in place-based ‘communities of practice’ that form a point of difference from existing theory. In concluding, we reflect on the implications of these arguments for the study of illicit economies, triads and post-Fordist working cultures.

The Information Age: Transnational Organized Crime, Networks, and Illicit Markets

In his landmark trilogy, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,sociologist Manuel Castells argued that networks, information technology, and global economic flows were altering the nature of politics, power, and states. This article examines the network dynamics Castells wrote about in relation to transnational crime and illicit economic markets. The article further explores Castells’s influence on the study of transnational organized crime, illicit networks, and the global illicit economy.

Wool Smuggling and the Royal Government in Mid-Fourteenth Century Northumberland

The international wool trade was an important part of Northumberland’s economy in the fourteenth century, and participation in it was central to the working lives of many local merchants. However, in the mid-fourteenth century the wool trade was subjected to an unprecedented period of royal regulation and taxation. The reaction of local export merchants to this was smuggling. This article examines both the practice and the prosecution of wool smuggling from Northumberland, primarily by use of legal records, and sets smuggling in a wider commercial, constitutional and judicial context to reveal its wider regional significance. Firstly, it situates Northumberland as a region in which this illicit economy assumed a particularly substantial measure of importance in commercial life. Secondly, it engages with the question of governance. Here, by focusing on the perceived legitimacy of taxation and law enforcement in the North-east, it argues that the conflict which resulted from the crown’s attempt to reshape the wool trade led to the blunting of the institutional mechanisms which were supposed to police the export trade in Northumberland. Smuggling therefore reveals some of the limits of royal authority in the far north of England.

Negotiating an Illicit Economy in the Time of COVID-19: Selling and Buying Dilemmas in the Lives of People Who Use Drugs in Scotland.

The impact of COVID-19 itself and societal responses to it have affected people who use drugs and the illicit drug economy. This paper is part of a project investigating the health impacts of COVID-19 related control measures on people who use drugs in Scotland. It examines their roles and decisions as economically situated actors. It does this within a moral economy perspective that places economic decisions and calculations within a context of the network of social obligations and moral decisions. The paper uses a mixed methods approach, reporting on a drug trend survey and in-depth interviews with people who use drugs. It finds they were affected by restrictions in the drug consumption context and changes in the supply context, both in terms of what was supplied and changes in the relationship between sellers and buyers. Face to face selling became more fraught. Participants in more economically precarious circumstances were faced with dilemmas about whether to move into drug selling. The double impact of loss of income and reduced access to support networks were particularly difficult for them. Despite the perception that the pandemic had increased the power of sellers in relation to their customers, many full-time sellers were reported to be keeping their prices stable in order to maintain their relationships with customers, instead extending credit or adulterating their products. The effect of spatial controls on movement during the pandemic also meant that the digital divide became more apparent. People with good access to digital markets and easy drug delivery through apps were in a better position to manage disruption to drug sales contexts. We make recommendations in relation to how policy can respond to the interests of people who use drugs in a pandemic.

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

Causality and Critical Thinking: Illicit Economy and Fragile State

This paper seeks to address a two-sided question of the state illicit economy: can the illicit economy, which is undoubtedly harmful to the state, also be a beneficial enabler. The prevailing view is affirmative. The answer in this paper is negative. Focusing on the regions and countries around the world where the illicit economy has proliferated over the past three decades, this paper examines how it has been destroying state authority over time. Meanwhile, this paper critically thinks the dominant view that “the illicit economy can help national policy development, and that marginalised groups in the global South can use it to access markets”, and suggests that states that abuse the illicit economy are simply quenching thirst with poison. This paper also fills a research gap on the causality between the illicit economy and “fragile” states, which until then had not been associated with the illicit economy. The causes of what constitutes a “fragile” state were generally associated with violent conflict, services, regulation and human security.

Wool smuggling from England's eastern seaboard,c. 1337–45: An illicit economy in the late middle ages

AbstractThe medieval English wool trade was a commercial activity of huge economic importance. The historiography of the medieval wool trade, however, has focused overwhelmingly on its legitimate side. This article uses the evidence of legal proceedings prosecuted in the royal courts to provide the first detailed account of wool smuggling in the fourteenth century, a time of heavy governmental regulation and hugely increased taxation. It demonstrates that a substantial number of merchants responded to these challenges by participating in a flourishing trade in smuggled wool which was considered a serious threat to crown fiscality. In particular, the article explores how smaller‐scale smuggling took place along under‐regulated areas of coastline away from customs ports; how major export operations were able to smuggle wool through the customs system itself; and how concerns over smuggling influenced a series of administrative reforms designed to improve the efficiency of commercial regulation.

Regulating the global illicit economy: Singapore's role in United States' spatial financial surveillance

Illicit transactions are increasingly integrated to legitimate financial flows between international financial centers (IFCs) and offshore jurisdictions (OJs). The United States (US) is actively engaged in regulating illicit transactions through anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) regulations backed by economic sanctions statutes. In this paper, I show how US sanctions regulatory capacity has developed by scaling out compliance and enforcement functions to state regulators and advanced business services (ABS) intermediaries in Singapore. Scaling out draws on a relational scale framework that locates the multiscalar surveillance of IFCs and OJs' entangled financial networks as an instrument for governing the illicit global economy. At the same time, Singapore's enrolment in US financial surveillance benefits the financial center by strengthening the city-state's regulatory functions. Using cases of high-profile illicit financial activities as well as interviews with regulatory agents in Singapore and to a lesser extent the US, the paper shows how multiscalar compliance and enforcement practices support US′ extra-jurisdictional discipline of rogue actors and jurisdictions while augmenting Singapore's stature as a clean and trusted financial center.

Cybercrime is (often) boring: Infrastructure and alienation in a deviant subculture

AbstractThe boredom and alienation produced by capitalist societies and countervailing forces of attraction and excitement are at the heart of the subcultural account of crime. The underground hacker subculture is no exception, commonly represented as based around exciting, technically skilled practices and high-profile deviance. However, the illicit economy associated with these practices has become industrialized, developing shared infrastructures that facilitate the sale of illicit services rather than skilled technical work. We explore how this shift in the nature of work has shaped the culture and experiences of this subculture. Developing a novel concept—the ‘illicit infrastructure’—and drawing on an extensive analysis of empirical data from interviews and novel data sources such as forums and chat channels, we argue that as they industrialize, deviant subcultures can begin to replicate the division of labour, cultural tensions and conditions of alienation present in mainstream capitalist economies.

Consequences of illegal COVID-19 waste scavenging and recycling

and recycling. Nevertheless, many adolescents are also involved in this illicit economy. This is a pragmatic scenario in many developing countries such as Bangladesh . Informal hazardous medical waste including COVID-19 infectious waste scavenging from HCEs, road side bins and waste dump sites are reported on the print and electronic media.

Erradicación en suspenso: La dimensión simbólica de la pacificación negociada en el VRAEM

The article explains the heterogeneous implementation of coca crop eradication in Peru, particularly the successive suspensions of eradication in the VRAEM, the most important producer. The VRAEM allows examining state capacity and state relations with non-state actors’ resistance, particularly coca growers. We conclude that state tolerance responds to a process of accumulation of the State's symbolic capital, produced in negotiation with coca growers. These social actors demand in return recognition of their role and the coca economy in the pacification and the established order. This order is hybrid, but it makes possible the State's development, the control of violence, and avoids monopolizing the illicit economy by insurgent actors.

Better Together? Intimate Partner Effects on Offending Women

The role of marriage has been extensively studied for its positive impacts on male desistance. However, the role of romantic partners for women is less understood. Do partners exert a prosocial “protective” effect or are they criminogenic? The present study empirically drills down on this question. Specifically, we assess the character and quality of romantic relationships on substance use and illegitimate income using a sample of incarcerated women. Drawing from social control, social learning, and strain theory, we hypothesize that the effects of both being in and breaking up from a relationship on illicit behavior are conditional on the quality of the relationship and behavior/characteristics of the partner. Using data from the Women’s Experience of Violence (WEV) project, consisting of a custodial sample of criminal justice-involved women (N = 770), we examine how relationship status and quality, as well as partner offending, influence drug use and illicit earnings. A series of multi-level random effects models are estimated to explore how within-person changes in relationship/breakup status are related to changes in the two dependent variables. Contrary to expectations, we find that romantic dissolution (of either a high- or low-quality relationship) does not negatively impact this sample of women and that being in a high-quality relationship is not a protective factor, as has been found often in male samples. Findings suggest partner behavior may be more important than the quality of the relationship with the partner. Our results link drug use and participation in the illicit economy to factors mostly outside of a woman’s relationship status and quality, thereby challenging some commonly understood mechanisms of desistance.

Outlaw Capital: Accumulation by Transgression on the Paraguay–Brazil Border

AbstractOutlaw economies are a key, but under‐appreciated, feature of late capitalism. With an ethnography of what one journalist called “the largest illicit economy in the Western Hemisphere” on the Paraguay–Brazil border, this article contributes empirical findings about the production of space for extralegal economies. Contributing to debates about geographies of the illicit, I theorise outlaw capital, a form of capital that negotiates profits and distributes rents through situated forms of deals, bribes, and schemes. Outlaw capital zones particular places as sites of useful transgression. Powerful spatial imaginaries then cast them out of thought, despite their connections to spaces of authorised economic practice. Outlaw capital’s diverse, flexible spatio‐economic forms benefit from explicit and tacit state support. As an example of theory building from the South, outlaw capital can help us think broadly about the power and politics of accumulation by transgression as a key logic of outlaw capital.

Memoria histórica del proceso educativo en el Corregimiento de El Plateado - Municipio de Argelia Cauca

El presente artículo surge como resultado de un ejercicio de sistematización de una experiencia educativa rural en el Departamento del Cauca - Colombia, específicamente en el Corregimiento de El Plateado, Municipio de Argelia Cauca, trabajo que planteó dentro de sus objetivos, reconstruir la memoria colectiva del proceso educativo desde la Institución Educativa Técnica Miguel Zapata, buscando con ello aportar elementos históricos de interés que posibiliten la identificación de los hitos más importantes dentro de la historia educativa local y a su vez, permita pensar en estrategias que ayuden a fortalecer los procesos pedagógicos en un escenario atravesado por una economía ilícita. El artículo se enmarca dentro de estrategias de investigación cualitativa en el marco de la sistematización de experiencias educativas, recurriendo a técnicas de investigación acción participativa para la reconstrucción de los sucesos más importantes de la educación en El Plateado. Como resultados relevantes, se resalta la historia de la Institución Educativa Técnica Miguel Zapata como la narrativa del trabajo organizado de la comunidad, del esfuerzo y exigencias hechas por estudiantes, padres de familia y docentes ante las instancias gubernamentales, del apoyo de organismos internacionales y nacionales, pero sobre todo, el sueño de un colectivo que ve en la institución una oportunidad y posibilidad de realizar transformaciones en materia cultural que permitan pensar y soñar en la idea de un Plateado, en el cual los jóvenes sean los actores principales de cambio.

Climate Change and Violence in Post-Conflict Colombia

The aim is to explain the link between climate-related issues and violent patterns in Colombia after the 2016 peace agreements. The main premise is that the effects of an erratic climate has an indirect but relevant influence in the emergence of new forms of violence. In other words, the climatic change and environmental degradation act as a “stressor” in different forms of violence in this commodity-based economy recovering from more than 50 years of internal armed conflict. The qualitative approach is based on semi-structured interviews with government representatives and academics to track different perspectives. It is argued that key environmental and climate-related issues in new forms of conflict after the peace deal are linked to the fragmentary distribution and control of land, the ongoing forced migration patterns, and expansion of a new and more lucrative illicit economy.

Prisoner Society in an Era of Psychoactive Substances, Organized Crime, New Drug Markets and Austerity

AbstractFramed by the limited and now dated ethnographic research on the prison drug economy, this article offers new theoretical and empirical insights into how drugs challenge the social order in prisons in England and Wales. It draws on significant original and rigorous ethnographic research to argue that the ‘era of hard drugs’ has been superseded by an ‘era of new psychoactive drugs’, redefining social relations, transforming the prison illicit economy, producing new forms of prison victimization and generating far greater economic power and status for suppliers. These changes represent the complex interplay and compounding effects of broader shifts in political economy, technological advances, organized crime, prison governance and the declining legitimacy and moral performance of English and Welsh prisons.

Minority gangs in Singapore prisons: Prisonisation revisited

This article attempts to better contextualise the theoretical and empirical connections between pre-prison orientation of prisoners and their subsequent adaption and subjective experiences of imprisonment using the case study of Omega, a racial minority gang in the Singapore prisons. While the article traces the gang’s emergence to its marginality in both the mainstream and illegitimate societies, the persistence of Omega beyond prisons is also shown to lie in its capacity to be remodelled for the street where the gang operates on an equal footing with the historically entrenched Chinese Secret Societies in the illicit economy. This research is not only able to adequately explain the form and hierarchy of penal subcultures, and the differentiated strategies offered by the various racial, class and gender groups to ‘surviving’ prisons, but also shows how in-prison adaptations affect the construction of post-prison identities and behaviours. The intent is to provide a nuanced sociological examination of the prison institution by capturing the iterative and interactive effects between the ‘outside’ (i.e. street) and the ‘inside’ (i.e. prison), thus extending the analysis beyond the deprivation-importation impasse by introducing an element of ‘exportation’ that help contextualise the racialised experiences of minority prisoners in the postcolonial state.

Labor Laws and Shadow Economies: A Cross‐National Assessment

ObjectiveToward better understanding the political economy of illicit economy, we examine the impact that labor laws have on illicit economic activity. Specifically, we posit that labor regulations are one of the key prospective benefits associated with formal work, and thus incentivize firms and individuals to participate in the formal, rather than illicit, sector. We further argue that the possible negative effect of labor laws on shadow economies is conditioned by countries’ institutional strength.MethodsTo test our hypotheses, we analyze time‐series, cross‐national data for over 100 countries from 1984 to 2012.FindingsResults suggest that labor regulations are negatively related to shadow economic activity and the suggested impact of labor laws is particularly germane to countries with stronger institutional capacity.ConclusionOur argument and findings challenge the notion that regulations, particularly labor‐related regulations, induce more illicit economic exchanges.