Transnational organized crime and the global security agenda: different perceptions and conflicting strategies

This chapter aims at define and discuss the relationship between TOC and global security in the broader context of multilateralism rules. Firstly, TOC will be analysed towards the rise of non-State actors, the crisis of state sovereignty and new threats, namely ethnic wars, and failed States. Secondly, in order to describe how perception is changing while discourse tends to remain rigidly confused, the International Relations theories on global security will be used as a theoretical framework to analyse both the most important strategies and documents, produced by the leading political actors. We argue that any internationalization process of crime definition and crime control is the outcome of the export of domestic perceptions and definitions, which reflected the relations among political powers. Thus, it was essentially based on the attempts of Western powers to export their domestic definitions, expressed in political, economic and moral terms. US and EU security agenda – namely their official documents - will be depicted and compared. Their shifting perceptions of global threats, among which TOC is appearing more and more, will be at the core of the analysis. Moreover, the contribution of the most important global agency – the United Nations Office for Drug and Crime - will be additionally studied. These considerations will be used, thirdly, to provide some conclusions on the political implications as outcomes of the different perceptions within the political agendas at a global level. Even though TOC is still perceived as a national law enforcement issue, multilateral cooperation, defined as the conduct founded on universal principles, equal participation of states in collective mechanisms, and no discrimination in putting principles into action (Attinà, 2008: 6) – as it has been shaped by US and EU - can represent the only way to adequate the perception to the discourse as well as the only political framework within which a coherent and efficient counterstrategy can be conceived and developed.