Illicit flows and criminality in modern states

Résumé du document

This essay is based on two articles: - Carolyn Nordstrom (2004): Invisible Empires, in: Bruce Kapferer (ed.) State, Sovereignty, War - Janet Roitman (2004): Productivity in the Margins: The Reconstitution of State Power in the Chad Basin, in Das and Poole: Anthropology in the Margins of the State. These articles give us a really interesting overview of different visions of illegal activities and organizations. They aim to establish a new distinction between ''legal'' and ''licit'' in order to have a different position about their consequences. To do so, it provides us with necessary precisions on what are illicit flows and illegal organizations.

Extraits

[...] To do so it provides us with necessary precisions on: what are illicit flows and illegal organisations. Illegal is what is ''contrary to or in violation of a law or an official rule Illicit is what is Contrary to accepted, especially social and moral conventions However, even if this definition seems really clear, the dividing line between legal and illegal and licit and illicit is not so clear. The definition is subjective given the fact that it depends on every country's laws and usages. [...]

[...] To justify this theory of a positive impact of illegal flows for State, we need to give a concrete example. In the Chad Basin, some people (dismissed, dispossessed, downsized and unemployed) have taken to the bush'' to answer themselves to their claims to wealth. That means that they enter organized groups of illegal activities and that they allow us to earn money and to counter what they feel is the state's monopoly over surpluses''. However, parallel system of taxes has been implemented: it is illegal but licit and at the end it serves the state. [...]

[...] The final result is that parallel system of taxes reinforces the power and its stability. As Janet Roitman says: state consolidation on the continent is now taking place via indirect or non bureaucratic means''. I would like to conclude this lecture diary by saying that the huge debate on the tax heavens after the G20 in London is representative of the need for the states to fight against the illegal flows. Even if they can't erase the phenomenon of tax heavens they have to show that they refuse this form of tax avoidance in order not to be seen as weak. [...]

[...] R.T Naylor shows that those phenomenons and their financial value are deliberately exaggerated in order to justify the existence of institutions and states to fight them. Policy makers insist on the dangerous people that would benefit from these illicit flows thanks to the existence of a shadow globalization'', a global parallel system. The danger seems even bigger when we you are said that they control sophisticated means and they can be linked to terrorism. Most of the time, this argument is used to justify the implementation of strong measures to control the populations and a pre-emptive international violence. [...]

[...] But on some points those texts differ According to Carolyn Nordstrom illegal flows generate fortunes and Empires. Those Empires are invisibles, the biggest of them control more resources than some countries and they can paralyzed emergent economies. They are not States and don't want to be States: they are a different kind of institution. This vision is mostly criticized by Itty Abraham and Willem Van Schendel. They try to underline that, according to them; the link between illegality and internationally organised criminals is not automatic. [...]