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Embedded in the past, yet embracing the future?: Fragile states, transnational crime, and the new 2030 Development Agenda Jean-Luc Lemahieu1
Introduction One of the many joys I have had since first meeting Michael years back on Bajan (Barbadian) shores has been the long hours of debate on topics that have been as diverse as Michael’s human interests – and that, really, is huge. No doubt the essay that follows, a first outline on the “functionality of crime,” is to undergo the same fate – with Michael certainly taking the side of the vulnerable and unprivileged. We are a tipping point, between the old which is fading and the new that is not yet born “What we face today is a set of transnational ideological and structural forces that can play havoc with the social order in even middle incomes states and create crises that spill across borders and affect regional and global security” (Goldstone et al. 2014). Prior to the 1980s transnational organized crime and terrorism, viewed through prism of the Cold War, were seen as proxies serving political agendas in an essentially bipolar world. The fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989 sparked not only the transformation of institutions, governments, and economies but also global crime. Organized crime started using terrorism as a means to further institutional gains, and terrorist groups ventured into crime to replace the state sponsorship of the past, blurring the lines of modus operandi between the two previously distinct groups (Makarenko 2004; Masden 2009, 66). The demise of a regulatory system wherein rival superpowers were able to coach their allies and client states, moved the security concept away from territorial protection toward new external threats influenced by globalization, technical developments, and ongoing economic integration. Security interests are no longer longer bound by territorial threats but instead have extended their scope to cybercrime, transnational terrorism, migration flows, and human trafficking, with fragile or complex countries characterized by weakened states, often miles away, becoming targets of transboundary criminal operations.
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