Networked territorialism: the routes and roots of organised crime
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Networked territorialism: the routes and roots of organised crime Andy Clark 1 & Alistair Fraser 2
& Niall
Hamilton-Smith 3
Accepted: 14 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the digital age, space has become increasingly structured by the circuitry of global capital, communications and commodities. This ‘network society’ splinters and fragments territorial space according to the hidden logic of networked global capital; with successful criminal entrepreneurs connecting bases in low-risk, controllable territories with highprofit markets. Drawing on a recent, large-scale study of organised crime in Scotland, in this paper we elaborate the relationship between place, territory and criminal markets in two contrasting communities. The first is an urban neighbourhood with a longstanding organised crime footprint, where recognised local criminal groups have established deep roots. The second is a rural community with a negligible organised crime footprint, where the drug economy is serviced by a mobile criminal network based in England. Through comparison of the historical roots and contemporary routes of these criminal markets, we note both similarity and difference. While both communities demonstrated evidence of ‘networked territorialism’, key differences related to historical and social antecedents, in particular the impact of deindustrialisation. Keywords Castells . Network society . Organised crime . Space . Deindustrialisation
* Alistair Fraser [email protected] Andy Clark [email protected] Niall Hamilton-Smith [email protected]
1
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK
2
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow, Ivy Lodge, 63 Gibson Street, Glasgow G12 8LR, UK
3
Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Stirling, Colin Bell Building, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK
Trends in Organized Crime
Introduction In the UK drama series McMafia, organised crime presents a different face to the traditional image of blue-collar localism. Criminal actors are white-collar, connected and cosmopolitan, with action shifting from the humble street to the zipline of global financial markets. Transactions ping around the planet at the click of a mouse, creating instantaneous yet invisible connections between distant global sites. Actors within this network are untethered from territorial roots, part of the ‘footloose economy’ of new world citizens moving flexibly between cities (Aas 2007: 58). As Hobbs has observed, however, the global is ‘local at all points’ (Latour 1993, cited in Hobbs 1998: 419). A mouse-click in London bounces to a offshore company in the Cayman Islands, a cashexchange in Mumbai, and a corrupt official in Lahore. In this way, the global criminal economy creates circuits of connection between otherwise disconnected sites in a way that closely mirrors the licit economy, as economic value-extraction is overlaid on localised ‘cultures of urgency’ (Davis 2008: xi
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