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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. The book examines mafias' ability to transplant in new and distant territories. Conventional wisdom suggests that organized crime migrates easily due to the spread of globalization and population migration, and criminal multinational corporations are increasingly unattached to a specific territory. According to Louise Shelley, the director of the Transnational Crime Institute in Washington, DC, “international organized crime has globalized its activities for the same reasons as legitimate multinational corporations.” Many authors argue that the notions of territorial entrenchment and control are becoming obsolete for a “Global Crime Inc.” that “transcends the sovereignty that organizes the modern state system.” The “transnational organized crime consensus” is influential among policymakers.

This chapter discusses the territoriality principle and its applications in various fields of the law. It shows that in the criminal law, common law countries have put far more emphasis on the territoriality principle than continental European countries. Because in the latter countries substantive justice has historically been considered as more important than evidentiary due process standards and extraterritorial jurisdiction is uncommon in the common law. Because territoriality has been the cornerstone of jurisdictional order in the common law, and extraterritorial jurisdiction has been shunned, it comes as no surprise that common law countries, the United States in particular, have construed the territorial principle rather broadly in order to get to grips with the challenges posed by transnational crime and economic globalization.

This chapter analyzes the emergence of substantive provisions with regard to crime. The chapter starts with the oldest and most widely known global regulations, such as maritime piracy, slavery, prostitution and narcotic drugs. It also contains the regulation of political crime and terrorism, which remained difficult to coordinate until late in the 20th century. The main emphasis is placed on more recent crime policies, in particular those related to transnational organized crime like human smuggling or illicit arms trafficking as well as cybercrime. In comparison to Chapter 3, this chapter shows that procedural components like police cooperation developed rather independently from political preferences, while the substantive regulations show a high degree of politics involved. This is in line with rationalization as the major principle of world society formation.

This chapter looks at whether and how international organizations and criminal law can help us deal effectively with transnational environmental crimes and, more broadly, with environmental insecurity and injustice. It explores the question of whether the climate change justice agenda can benefit from the expanded pursuit of transnational environmental crime. The chapter asks whether international environmental law, refurbished, act as a mitigating factor in climate change. It concludes that while current international legal instruments can help spur additional action, by themselves, they will prove inadequate. Consequently, one idea proposed is a new international environmental court to deter all forms of ecocide.

Mangai Natarajan explores the impact of the influential criminologist Gerhard Mueller on the formation of the concept of transnational crime and its institutionalization in the post-World War II period. She shows how he introduced the term transnational crime in the mid-1970s at the UN Crime Congress in Switzerland as a criminological term to describe cross-border crime, and how it slowly evolved into a legal rather than criminological descriptor and was taken up by the UN criminal justice bureaucracy.

What is transnational crime, and what is trafficking? This chapter reviews prior literature on the main issues informing these questions, including informal economy, criminal markets, organised crime, ‘the underworld’, and the theory of the spectrum of enterprise. It is the latter that serves as a touchstone concept, linking illicit enterprise to legal business and bringing the theoretical tools of white-collar crime thinkers into the same analytical pool as those of organised crime theorists. Doing so, we come to see that the idea of business enterprise in its contemporary context can drive criminal market activities as well as legal markets. We review aspects of relevant social theory including ideas of globalisation, indifference, the banality of evil, and psychological writing on ‘compartmentalisation’, to develop a distinctively criminological approach to understanding the social drivers and facilitators of trafficking.

This chapter asks: what is driving criminal justice cooperation between Australia and Indonesia? By tracing various ‘wars on crime’ waged by both countries since the 1970s, it reveals how the politicization—and ultimately ‘securitization’—of transnational crime has provided much of the impetus for cooperation between them. This helps correct the standard view that such cooperation is simply a response to a growth in transnational criminal activity. The chapter concludes that the greater the politicization of a transnational problem, the greater the political will to pursue international cooperation in response. It does not follow, however, that the politicization of transnational crime within each country will necessarily result in cooperation between them. In fact, the very act of politicization can (somewhat paradoxically) make cooperation harder to achieve.

The loss of their cultural treasures through illicit excavation, illegal export, and trafficking and the associated harm to national identity and the rights of their citizens presents a major challenge to many countries around the world. The source countries tend, on the whole, to be poorer developing States while the importing market countries are rich States such as the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. This chapter first provides a critical analysis of the international cultural heritage law governing this question, in particular the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Illicit Trade in Cultural Property and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on the Return of Stolen and Illegally Exported Cultural Objects. Following this discussion, and as a contrast to the purely cultural heritage-based approach, it focuses on two complementary efforts to combat cultural property trafficking as an international or transnational crime: the 2000 ‘Palermo’ UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime and the 2017 ‘Nicosia’ Convention on Offences Relating to Cultural Property.

Over the past three decades many regulatory measures aimed at countering transnational crime have been adopted. This article maps the development of these measures and examines their relationship with the ‘global rule of law’. The article is structured on the basis of a typology of production of transnational criminal law norms and examines the production and implementation of transnational criminal law via: ‘hard law’ global multilateral conventions; regionalism, focusing on the work of the Council of Europe; ‘soft’ or ‘informal’ law, focusing on the Financial Action Task Force; ‘global administrative law’, expressed by the UN Security Council; and supranational, EU, law. The article then focuses on the extraterritorial reach of transnational criminal law and asks whether lessons can be learnt by the operation of the principle in EU criminal law. The article then assesses the impact of this typology of transnational criminal law making on the global rule of law.

The main focus of chapter 4 is trafficking of human beings as a crime against humanity in the context of Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the ICC. The chapter discusses the importance and role of the ICC and the enforcement of the Rome Statute with special reference to Article 7 which deals with crimes against humanity. The chapter describes the nature and characterization of crime against humanity followed by a detailed description adopted in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of ICC in its Elements of Crimes in crimes against humanity. It also highlights the nature of each crime of trafficking, namely, drugs, arms and ammunitions and human beings and their inter connectivity. Article 7(1) of the Rome Statute and its clauses with the elements of crime has also been elaborated in the chapter with reference to crimes against humanity and human trafficking.

Fighting transnational crime requires coordination among law enforcement agencies from multiple countries, but such cooperation is still relatively shallow. This chapter examines two types of criminal activities—drug trafficking and money laundering. The focus is on the U.S.-led efforts to reduce cocaine trafficking from the Andean countries. Despite significant efforts, first at interdiction and then at reducing the coca supply, cocaine trafficking finds new routes and continues. Similarly, efforts to thwart money laundering, while experiencing some notable successes through the Financial Action Task Force, are ultimately undermined by the vast rewards for countries that choose not to cooperate. Overall, without a significant change in the willingness of countries to cooperate more deeply on law enforcement, transnational crime is likely to continue to flourish.

Chapter 3 explains how the gap between state-centric views on borderlines and transnational realities at the margins turn borderlands in vulnerable regions into extreme cases of complex security dynamics. First, it presents how state-centric views that stop at the borderline have historically shaped security policies toward the Colombia-Ecuador and Colombia-Venezuela borders. It then contrasts these with a transnational perspective that analyzes security dynamics from within the Colombian-Ecuadorian and Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands. Adopting such a transnational borderland lens, the chapter maps violent non-state group interactions in recent history across these borderlands and contextualizes them with the spatial distribution of the various cocaine supply chain stages and interconnected forms of transnational organized crime. Together with socioeconomic and cultural conditions that vary along and across the borders, the logic of these illicit cross-border flows informs the groups’ motives for cooperation, which in turn shape their interactions.

Neil Boister, Sabine Gless, and Florian Jeßberger define key terms and concepts, including the notion of transnational criminal law, explain the structure of the book, and carve out a number of general themes which are identifiable in the histories of transnational criminal law.

Starting with an account of Australia–Indonesia police cooperation after the 2002 Bali bombings, this chapter explains the purpose of the book (to identify the conditions that promote criminal justice cooperation between the two countries) and its argument (cooperation is more likely when a balance exists between political and policy interests). The chapter also discusses the interdisciplinary approach used in the book, looking first at the strengths and limitations of theories of international cooperation from international relations and transnational policing studies, and then describing how a regulatory perspective—which involves a pragmatic inquiry into how different actors influence the governance of a social problem—helps address the limitations. It concludes with an outline of the remaining chapters.

Neil Boister surveys the history of the crime suppression conventions from the beginning of the 19th century but with the main focus being on the inter-war period in the 20th century. He shows how the indirect system of application through national criminal law and sustained respect for what might be called penal sovereignty made it difficult for scholars of the day to incorporate these offences within a grand scheme of international criminal law.